Bend over, come closer… is there a cool breeze whistling down your butt crack? Is the world jingling its pockets for change to stick in your coin slot? Then I have the Instructable for you: the coin slot detector.

Multimedia artist Amy Khoshbin has combined a Lilypad Arduino, vibrating motor and photoresistor to solve the (hopefully not sticky) problem of plumbercrackitis. The photoresistor measures the amount of light beaming down your foul line. If there’s light, we’ve got visual contact and the vibrating motor is triggered. Time to pull it up, baby!

Unnecessary you say? Just plain silly? The waste of a perfectly good microcontroller which ought better expend its cleverness to flash a cheerful sorority of bright whites?

Oh, I beg to disagree, my friends, lest you find a photo of your broad smile Flickring for all to see.

NOTE: I switched out computers this weekend and Adobe is not allowing me to reinstall CS2 (yes, I’m still using 2). So no pics this week because I’m Photoshop-less.

It’s now been an entire week away from TEI and I must admit the glow is starting to fade as the day-to-day toils of life clog my mind. But here are some great links to take me back to it all:

TUI Blog by form+zweck
Written mainly by Christian Zöllner, one of the creators of the SMSlingshot which was demoed at TEI (it allows you to type in a message then slingshot it onto a wall).

Groove Mechanic: TEI Demo Roundup
This blog by Abel Allison, one of the creators of the TessalTable, offers another nice roundup of the demos.

Technology Review: Malleable Maps, Artistic Robots and Bubble Interfaces
Videos of five of the demos — 3-D Responsive Map, Interactive Art Cobots, Tangible Jukebox (very cool), Augmented Reality Pattern Table (very very cool), Soap Bubble Interface (see my video from last week). Unfortunately, the vids are narrated (oddly) by a monotone voice that makes what’s being described sound almost boring.

Humanism at the MIT Media Lab’s TEI Conference??!
Last but not least, Jon Kolko looks back at the conference and comes up with the conclusion that “the geeks are begging for design.”

KITS

Below are a few kits available from people who gave related workshops at TEI. I would have loved to have taken these workshops, but we could choose only one. Oh well, at least I can pretend to conduct my own pseudo-workshop at home. And you can, too.

Fabric Sensor Kits
Hannah Perner-Wilson is currently a grad student in MIT’s High-Low Tech group (read this interview with Hannah from Fashioning Technology). She held a workshop at TEI on making textile sensors from scratch.

Fritzing
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Fritzing is open source software that helps non-technical designers move from physical prototype to actual product: creating a printed circuit board with the appropriate circuit and desired shape.

Vital Threads Biofeedback Apparel
Sean Montgomery is a recent neuroscience PhD who likes to stand out in a crowd. I had a blast meeting him at TEI and seeing his devices in person. On this site, you can get kits for his Truth Wristband (turns from blue to red as the wearer becomes aroused) and Heart-felt Apparel (detects your heart beat and displays it as a pulsing LED heart on your t-shirt).

Top 30 Wiimote Hacks
I also missed the Wiimote Hackery workshop and the presenters — Amanda Wiiliams and Daniela Rosner — don’t have any kits. But Wiimotes are crazy-easy to hack, so here are Hack N Mod’s top 30 Wiimote hacks (my favorite is #2 Wiimote Controlled Lawn Mower).

Have fun hacking and don’t forget — if you’re not pulling your hair out at some point in the making, you must be doing too many things right.

TEI Studios from jay silver on Vimeo.

So I went to the TEI Conference last week and had a fantastic time — learning, meeting people, having braingasmic fun. This conference concerns itself with the interlinking of the digital and physical worlds through tangible interfaces, whole-body interaction and interactive surfaces.

There were about 230 attendees from around the world and everyone was brilliant, accomplished and collaborative. Although English was the lingua franca, people were gabbing in German, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese (just to name a few) — a refreshing breeze through my Brocas since I live in very white Vermont.

Of course, right off the bat, I went to the wrong building. Somehow I didn’t know that MIT has built a brand new Media Lab building, a cross between an Apple store and Kubrick’s 2001 — very white with lots of glass, a floor-to-ceiling central atrium with wrap-around labs and walkways criss-crossing from one side to the other. Apparently I have no sense of direction at all whatsoever, because the second I was off the conference floor I was lost. (Though quite happily so.)

I had planned to tweet during the papers, but I couldn’t get past the rudeness of having a computer in my lap while someone’s presenting. I know from first-hand experience that it’s awful to look out at an audience and not find anyone looking back at you. And I didn’t tweet from the hotel because you had to pay for wifi, which I refused to do (yes, I’m cheap).

However, I did shoot a few videos, and this week’s Geek includes a couple that describe the breadth of the work shown at the conference.

The Soft and the Hard

We all use interfaces every day — our phones, microwaves, light switches, cars. We push a button, click a mouse, swipe a finger. We expect them to be where they always are which is, in fact, considered to be good design.

However, what if an interface is temporary, ephemeral? Do we really need to know where it is all the time if we know what it is? And what if the interface requires great care in its handling? Does this make it more precious or the work it accomplishes more dear? These are just a few of the questions that come to mind with the work of Tanja Doring, an integration of art and technology:

With Soumitra Bhat, however, we have a lovely synthesis of music, technology and social impact. He has created TouchTone, an electronic musical instrument for children with cerebral palsy. It’s a clever way of giving these children access to the joy and therapeutic benefits of making music. Normally, their limited physical abilities make it impossible for them to play a musical instrument.

These two innovations describe the breadth of work presented at the conference — from concrete applications of interaction design to more abstract ideas of how we might use the various properties of physical objects in combination with either current or projected computational and/or electronic capabilities.

Stay tuned for more next week — workshops (and kits). The video at the top is just a tease of how cool they were.

Check out her interview with the band Care Bears on Fire, three twelve year olds who rock it out.

LINKS:
- Smart Girls at the Party