Yesterday I made my way down to see what’s happening at the V&A for their Digital Design Weekend. Besides what is becoming a regular openFrameworks workshop at the V&A this time held by  hellicar & lewis there were also a number of exibits on show. One of these was, what I can only refer to as, “Birds” by Neil Mendoza, whom I’ve previously met at London’s oF meetup aka knitting circle, and Anthony Goh.

The piece consists of four mobile phones, hacked to represent birds, mounted on tree branches with a peculiar behaviour to them. Each “bird” is a hacked Nokia phone, of an older generation, equipped with tiny arduinos and designed to respond to phonecalls by flapping their wings or moving their head around. Additionally, every time on of these birds receives a call, which by the way is never answered (they are a non sociable sort), it goes on to dial other birds which consequently respond with their own behaviour. Eventually the calls reduce awaiting one of the exhibition visitors to make the call. Each bird has a little name underneath it, in this instance a phone number which you can dial anytime. Even more interestingly, 1 of the four birds is on Virgin network while other three on Vodaphone. Apparently, the first does not like to pick up calls (moody) and not as reliable (friendly) as others.

There is no documentation on the project just yet but you can see many other interesting projects by Neil on this website.

+ Follow Neil on Twitter.

It was also great to catch up with Joel and Marek and check out that they’ve been up to at the oF workshop. More details on this once they become available.

Sniff is an interactive public projection in a storefront window: an animated dog follows passers-by, discerns their behavior as friendly or aggressive, tries to engage them in a play and forms a relationship with them based on the history of the interaction.

Sniff is created with Unity3d Game Engine which renders the dog in real time and allows to dynamically change his behavior based on the video tracking data. The sidewalk is illuminated with infrared lights and an infrared-sensitive camera that is used to monitor the sidewalk in front of the display windows. The position of each viewer is tracked and simple gesture recognition implemented, so that fast, big actions are interpreted as threatening and slow actions directed at the dog (for example hand extended in his direction) are interpreted as friendly. The dog keeps track of the attitude of the viewer and forms a relationship with them over time based on the history of interaction.

A project by Karolina Sobecka with software design by Jim George. Built with openFrameworks and Unity3d.

Find additional info, updates and details at: http://www.gravitytrap.com/sniff