Ideas for Dat106

Transforming Stonehouse

The first trip to stonehouse took us to several different parts, focussed mainly around the waterfront areas of stonehouse, as opposed to the more in land parts.

My idea for this project is to concentrate on areas with repeating patterns, and I took photos based around this idea.

i took this photo because i liked the way the door interrupted the brick pattern of the wall, breaking up the repetition.

another concept i looked at was pathways, and how things flowed, for example, buildings, and rows of objects, that created a visible path or route, this goes hand in hand with the idea of repetition, as a row of repeating objects can be turned into a pathway that can be followed

here are some other photos of the stonehouse area that i feel showed the repetition idea very well

during the first trip we came up the idea of removing all of the plant life in Stonehouse and replacing it with technology, such as flowers with cameras, grass made of solar panels, and so on.

based upon this idea, i made some drawings.

The first image came about through seeing an acorn logo in the Stonehouse area near a play park,

and decided that with a USB logo inside it, would make an effective logo for a technological transformation of Stonehouse.

the second drawing i did was to signify the way that the plant life would be transformed, through the plug being directly powered by the earth/ grass.

we paid another visit to stonehouse, and i came up with the idea of using mirrors, to create repeating images with a path way, like in this rough image.

I also thought of the idea of mental reflection, and the way the stonehouse area will make people feel when the visit stonehouse, this idea will be used for my postcard, perhaps showing a relaxing scene.

Stonehouse map: without experience

i basically mapped the areas from the map which had grassy areas, as they are places which we may well focus on, using the idea of changing the plantlife into technology.

I redid this version and added the areas that are city based and street based

Green: Grassy areas

Red: Dense population or industrial areas

Yellow: Street areas

Stonehouse map: With experience

This time i decided to go with the mental reflection idea and create a map based on how i felt in certain areas.

Key: simple key, the lighter the colours are, the more relaxed or calming the area is.

This applies well to my mental reflection idea because of the way certain and specific areas effect feelings.

Layered Maps

this is the image of all of the group members maps layered

Chosen area

We first chose a small enclosed area with a path, with a lot of plantlife, however, with the introduction to the projections, its been decided that this area will be unsuitable for a projection, so our final area is a small roundabout just outside royal william yard

here is the area from a ground view.

This is a panorama of the area taken from inside the roundabout, showing the entire area.

this area will be a lot more suitable for the projection, as the group has come up with the idea of projecting things onto the bus stops around the roundabout, so that they show things you wouldnt usually see in a bus stop.

Postcard

this is my stonehouse postcard, i basically took one of the photos i took at stonehouse, and made it look as if the tide had come in, i chose to do this because of a personal love of waves and the sea, and how i makes me very calm and relaxed, which is one of my ideas for stonehouse's transformation.

New ideas

Due to the changing of the area we have chosen, the group has decided that we will focus on the bus stop of the area, and create objects which we wouldn't expect to see in bus stops.

this idea will go very well with the projection, as we can put something into the bus stops to interest people, or freak them out, depending on the situation.

Projection

As a group, we decided that the projection would be something that could intrigue people who were waiting for a bus or walking past, one idea was to have people dancing , or have clowns in the bus stop.

These are some videos which capture a similar vibe

The snow projection video is particularly good due to the fact that the eyes are a very bizarre choice of image to project, which is what we would like to get across in our projection.

GPS & Hertzian space

Really interesting stuff with Ben Reynhart, talked about stuff like gps drawing and visualizing data, not fully sure how this will work with our groups ideas but its very interesting stuff.

Group trip

me and Adam went down with the rest of the class, and traveled along union street, taking Bluetooth and WiFi readings, the results however weren't as great as we'd hoped, as we had difficulty recording them and there were very few, particularly Bluetooth, and in several instances i couldn't find any other users at all, despite being with a group of people who had Bluetooth enabled phones.

Took a trip out around Plymouth mapping where we went, however, this was not with the group, so instead went with some other first years from different groups, and traveled around from uni to the bottom part of Plymouth.

sadly we weren't able to create a visualization, however Iain (AKA Giantkiwi;http://giantkiwi.co.uk/category/idat/idat106/), a first year from another group who joined us on the trip through plymouth, used google latitude over the course of a few weeks to create this map.

While i have been unable to get into plymouth to doing any gps mapping recently, due to the fact i dont live there, or have any form of gps, the rest of the group have been able to, and have made a map of plymouth showing WiFi interaction, with the blue areas showing the the signals and the green areas showing the usage from laptops and phones, and other portable WiFi devices.

Arduino and Projection.

Started using Arduino boards today, pretty interesting stuff, especially learning that we can use these for the projections, this instantly gave me the idea for some sort of sound based projection, as i love music and sound, so i found a video relevant to my ideas

i love the idea of some sort of sound equalizer, using a number of LEDs, perhaps a tree that grows as sound is sensed, so that it looks like it is climbing up a wall as more sounds goes on.

this idea could also be easily transferred to a light sensor, so that when light is shone onto it, LED plants appear, the only problem is that it would require a large amount of Boards to create something like this through the use of LEDs, so it would have to also use something like Flash or Processing to visualize the data.

The idea for plants seems to have been fully dropped, as has my idea for a plant equalizer, as i am not of a high enough standard to create something like that yet, maybe for another project perhaps?

the idea is well and truly focussed on bus stops and odd goings on in them, unfourtunately i have been unable to work with the group a lot recently due to other projects and as ever, the difficulty of getting into Plymouth outside of uni times, however, they have been able to create a fantastic projection for a bus stop.

The projection is based around a motion sensor, with the premise being that when somebody walks or drives past a bus stop, an animation is triggered, from one of 5 videos, always returning to a 6th video where nothing is happening.

the video features two members from our group sitting in a bus stop, and when motion is sensed, then another video will play, if the sensor is not triggered, then the normal sitting video is looped.

Here are the videos, starting with the Normal sitting video