Category: capstone2019

 
Perhaps you are not familiar with “ACG”, but you might have heard of some representative works in this field, such as Pokemon, Dragon Ball, or Vocaloid singer Hatsune Miku. ACG is the abbreviation of “Anime, Comic, and Games”, and the phrase refers to the cultural phenomenon and relative industries in East Asia, especially in Japan.
The project Ritual of Summoning was born under the trend of digitalized fandom in ACG culture. Its creative interaction and open-ended design can introduce participants to an unprecedented experience across both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional worlds. Here the participants play the role of a chosen master, and they can uncover the mysterious magic circle and launch the sacred ritual of summoning. With the participants’ powerful internal spirit, the unknown ACG characters will wake up and respond to their commands. Then, the participants are free to discover what they can do with the summoned force.
Located in the center of all the attempts is the core question: how to break the wall between 2-dimensional and 3- dimensional space? Traditionally, ACG fans are considered as passive receivers of plotted stories, as they wait for weekly anime updates in front of televisions or purchase monthly published comics from bookstores. Unlike sports and music industries where fans usually get a chance to interact with their favorite idols, hardly can ACG fans take part in similar events. Because the celebrities in ACG works are either on printed paper or on screen, it is impossible for fans to attend autograph sessions and meet with characters face to face. An invisible gap lies between the physical world where fans live and the media where characters are created.
As Mizuko Ito mentions in Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World, “Fans are not merely consumers of content but also creators of content that is of special significance to them (Jenkins 1992; Penley 1997). Part of what Jenkins (1992, 2006) has described as a participatory media culture, fans are an audience that actively and proactively creates meaning” (230-231). Out of affection as well as the demand of interactivity, ACG fans have been eager to reproducing 2-dimensional assets into 3-dimensional formats by, for example, performing Cosplay and making handcrafted Garage Kits. In recent years, technological developments have also paved the way for cross-dimensional communication in ACG community. More and more digital fandom products have benefited from video/audio editing platforms, 3D modeling techniques, human-computer interaction devices, and artificial intelligence systems. It really changes the way in which people interact in ACG culture, and promotes the whole industry to a higher stage.
My project Ritual of Summoning combines skeleton tracking and hologram projection to explore a simplified prototype of artificial intelligence. Kinect connected to Processing tracks human body movements and further transforms them into data. Hologram projection generates a 3-dimensional illusion in a pyramid-like container which can be seen with naked eyes. The entire project allows participants to experience kinetic interaction with ACG characters and enjoy a vivid 3-dimensional visual effect. It also mimics how an artificial intelligent system works and makes a bold assumption on futuristic imaging technology. Most significantly, this project explores cross-dimensional communication in ACG culture and creates a platform for ACG fans to interact with their favorite characters creatively.

 
One in every ten people in this world is disabled in a certain way. This equates to 650 million people-living with a disability. We might not know how they were disabled, but we can all imagine how different their lives could be. What if there is a product that could help the disabled to do things with their minds only? Brain Artist is seeking a solution for them. With this product, users will be able to make artistic drawings without actually using a paint brush, but with their mind instead.
The product contains two main parts. An EEG headset and a computer screen-based visualizer. The EEG headset will record the electromagnetic waves generated by your brain, then filtered out and separated into different components, including attention, meditation, alpha band, beta band theta band, etc. Different brainwaves represent different function of the brain. Due to the technological limitation, the only two brainwaves that could be interpreted and controlled properly are the attention and meditation level. The attention level will rise when you are focusing on a certain thought, visual cue, sound, etc. And the meditation level will increase when you are more relax.
There are three different kinds of visualization included in this project. The first one is to create a flower like image. The more you focus, the cursor will move more towards the center, and vice-versa. The more you relax, the color will be more greenish, and the less relax you are, the whiter it will be. You can also control the speed, the number and the thickness of the stroke. You can pause and save the image whenever you find it worth saving.
The second project I call it the Space. You can use your keyboard/mouse to control a planet/black hole to attract all the other small planets in the space. The more you concentrate, the attraction force will be greater. And the planet you are controlling will be redder. And when you lose attention, the planets you have attracted will escape away. You will also be able to manipulate other variables like adding friction or changing the attraction distance of your planets. By playing with it, you can not only train yourself to control your attention, but also immerse in a space environment and enjoy playing with it.
The third visualization is more open and more likes an experiment. Your attention and meditation level will control the painter. The greater you focus, the cursor will move to the right, the more you relax, the cursor will move more to the top, and vise-versa. You can also manually change the speed, thickness of the painter to create your own art work.
One purpose of this project is to help disabled people to get involved with the of art creation, since the users don’t need to hold a brush by themselves. On the other hand, this project also benefits healthy people in the way of helping them practice mind control. For instance, users will be able to develop their capacity on focusing attention through the process of using this product. Young children will find it fun to play with while getting their cognitive capacity developed when playing. And for ADHD patients, it helps them to better control their attention in a playful and relaxing environment. Everyone could benefit from using this product, and with better development of this brain-computer interface, it will change the way we interact with computer in the future.

 
In her podcast, How Cum, Charlotte Kassimir emphasizes one of the main aspects of intercourse sexual education fails to address. And as one can observe by analyzing the services provided by Planned Parenthood, sexual education in the United States has failed to provide a thorough explanation of how sexual intercourse can be an enjoyable experience for all of the parties involved. For women especially, due to the evident taboo surrounding their sexuality, such lack of information can affect one’s sexual experience exponentially. Thus, this project, Sex Ed for Women, aims to fill in the pre-mentioned gap and act as an educational website for women who wish to comprehend and further explore their sexual needs.
Fortunately, information concerning women’s sexual experiences exists in scholarly journals. However, such text presents the content in academic and medical jargon that an ordinary audience may find difficult to digest. Not to mention, even academics are still uncertain as to what constitutes a female orgasm. It would be difficult for women to understand how to pleasure themselves when even researchers are unaware of how they can reach orgasm. Thus, Sex Ed for Women was born with the sole objective of pooling together all the research available in a concise, understandable language, to help shrink the pleasure gap. In short, studies have shown that nearly 91 percent of men reach orgasm during sexual intercourse as opposed to 39 percent of women.
This project, in so far, tackles three main subjects to fulfill its intended objective. The first section of this website, titled “Flick the Bean!” tackles the various styles of touch, pressure, and the tactics a sample of 1,000 women use to enhance orgasm during both sexual intercourse and masturbation. Styles of touch, on the one hand, vary from pulsating to pressing and occasionally flicking. Tactics used to enhance orgasm vary from switching breathing patterns to spending time to build arousal.
The second section of this project, “It’s Not All Bananas”, tackles the differences between vagina stimulation and clitoral stimulation. The research portrayed throughout this section presented several intriguing facts, including how most women confessed to needing clitoral stimulation during intercourse to reach orgasm yet seldom tend to ask for said stimulation from their partners. Studies show that especially when a male partner is introduced, clitoral stimulation and orgasm frequency drops like flies.
The last currently live section of this project is titled “Sexual Healing” and it focuses on a study written by Claudia Schmiedeberg, et al., “The More or the Better? How Sex Contributes to Life Satisfaction.” The pre-mentioned research paper by Schmiedeberg, et al. narrates how there is a clear correlation between general life satisfaction and fulfillment of a person’s sexual desires. The “Sexual Healing” section of this website later encourages women to put to test the styles and tactics suggested throughout the website to reach improve their overall life satisfaction by fulfilling their sexual desires.
Finally, this project aims to create a sense of community and belonging as well. And it does so by allowing the women who visit the site to make their own suggestions through a question and answer (Q&A) section. Each Q&A component allows the user to respond to certain questions. Thereafter the questions are saved and displayed once the user has visited all of the sections enlisted throughout the website.
This project will be further developed in years to come to fulfill its goal of ending the pleasure gap existent in society. As it develops, there will be subjects added to the site through the exploration of further research. Over time, it is expected that this website will turn into a sexual guide for women, thus stripping the overarching taboo which haunts discussions concerning female sexuality.

 
Learning an instrument and using it to play harmonious music is not an easy thing to achieve for people especially those who do not know about music theory. With the aim of making music in a more creative way for everyone and sparking non-musicians’ interest in music, ShadowPlay provides an interactive sound generating experience where users can create their unique music by moving bodies in front of Microsoft Kinect camera.
The project is inspired by Oskar Fischinger’s ornament sound experiment. Oskar Fischinger was one of the pioneer artists who produced what was later called “graphical sound” by running strips of film of hand-drawn ornamental patterns through the projector. This experiment was conducted in 1930s and was an early successful trial to create sound out of images. Will it reveal new possibilities if we incorporate modern technology into it and re-create this visual-to-sound conversion in the contemporary context with engaging audiovisual user experience? ShadowPlay is an experiment to explore the possible answer to this question. Compared with the original experiment, ShadowPlay, with cutting-edge technology involved, has more interactive elements. Body movements is the main means of interaction and there is no specific rule or requirement for generating music, which lowers the threshold of interaction and makes it more accessible. As long as users can move their bodies, they can gain an immersive experience. As opposed to the pre-drawn film strips and predictable sound waves, musical notes are generated in real-time when users make different body movements in ShadowPlay. With the help of knowledge of signal processing and music theory, all sounds are synthesized according to different parameters taken from users’ position and movement data by computer. For example, the horizontal position is mapped to the pitch of the root note in the compound sound, then based on that root note, different chords are played in a crisp timbre and a long-drawn-out soft one, which adds to the richness of the music. The width of the shadow determines the waveform of the root note users hear. Narrower shadows produce sharper notes of triangle waves or square waves while a wide shadow created by user’s fully stretched body produces smoother sine waves. The sound generation mechanism keeps the core of Fischinger’s experiment which is to produce sound by interpreting shapes as sound waves and adds flexibility and playability to it. As for the visuals, the body images captured are shown as black shadows against white background and projected onto the screen along with basic shapes in color representing the sound. Black and white interface with random glitches are chosen to reproduce the 1930s feeling and bring users back to Fischinger’s time. In the meantime, on the shadows there are colorful shapes Oskar Fischinger’s music animation was famous for that tell users the position of the detection point on his/her body and gives clues to how his/her body movement is affecting the sound.
This interactive music generation project targets audience of all ages. As they experience this music production process, they will also figure out the underlying relationship between their body movement and the sound generated. People can also learn about Oskar Fischinger’s achievements in graphical sound field in the information page easily accessible from the main game page. This project can serve as an introduction to music theory in a broad sense such as chord theories, waveforms, and arouse their interest in music for non-musicians especially kids while they have fun producing their unique music.