Report from NYU's ITP Winter Show

I paid a visit to NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program's Winter show last night, and as usual was blown away by the hard work and creativity of many of the projects. The level of sophistication seems to increase from show to show. The folks at ITP provided a handy map to the show that categorized the projects into 11 different general subject areas (sustainable, assistive technology, games, etc.). Very helpful. I took a few short videos of some of the projects. For more, go to the Make Blog's more comprehensive post.

This project is called "Magic Table," by Seung Jun Lee. The screen interacts visually and musically to objects that are passed or placed in front of a sensor. I think this would also make a great video wall installation in some public place.



TwiTerra, by Steven Lehrburger, tracks "re-tweets" -- re-transmissions of Twitter messages -- by projecting the approximate location of messages as they are forwarded from one person to another around the world.



Matt Parker's "Face of the Nation" did a nice job of morphing all of the US presidents and the current president-elect into a looped video that's fun to watch.



"Ballet Dancer," by Ramona Pringle and Xue Hou, projects moving images of a ballet dancer against floating layers of gauze and tulle. It reminded me a bit of something a Disney Imagineer would do.



There were two projects that were similar in that they used a library of captured images to create a moving image, kind of like what Chuck Close is known for doing in some of his portraits. One of these is called "membrain," by Yasser Ansari, Peter Horvath, and Bruno Kruse. A video of membrain appears below. The other is "Video Mosaic" by Meredith Hasson. Here is a short video of membrain:



The show runs again tonight, December 18, from 5 to 9 p.m. There will be another one in the spring.