Each loci is a unique 3D printed sculpture bespoke to someone’s flights spurring recollection, reflection and conversation about their travels.

It is a working prototype made for my final project while studying at CIID. I am not releasing the software yet as we are aiming to include loci directly in an iPhone app I co-created called Flying. A big part of the app, is the ability to track one’s flights, so it would be fantastic to be able to create a loci directly from whithin Flying!

Through custom software built in Max/MSP, the user is able to select specific flights that matter to them, such as a honey moon, a summer vacation through Europe or all of their flights from a given year. To ease this process, the user can connect to Tripit or Foursquare and import their past flight data automatically.

Each loci comes with a card highlighting on a map all the airports flown to. The sculpture can be placed on this card to help visualize their travels. Additional information is displayed on the card, such as the title chosen by the user, the total distance travelled, the number of airports visited, and the number of flights taken.

The software generates a file suitable for 3D printing, so that the user can either print it themselves or use a service like Shapeways that prints for them.

Thanks to Brian Rink for being my advisor for the project and Sterling Crispin for helping me figure out some programming issues I had. And of course everyone that helped me along the way!

Form 

The interface is designed to be intuitive and tangible. Flipping the Skube changes the modes, tapping will play or skip songs and flipping a Skube on its front face will turn it off. The shape informs the user to the ways they are able to connect the music players together. This allows different Skubes to be in either Discovery mode or Playlist mode when connected to other players. When multiple Skubes are connected together,they act as one music player and they contribute to a global playlist that is played on all them.

Super Angry Birds is a force feedback USB controller for Angry Birds that simulates the feeling of a slingshot. All the controls found in the game are available in this device. You can control the pull, the angle, and of course trigger the special power of the bird.

We hacked a motorized fader found in audio mixing consoles to create the force feedback. If you are interested, you can read the paper. Basically, the way we achieved this is by drawing a force curve and storing the values in a table, then we send the current position of the slider through the table and extract the value to send to the motor that applies an opposing force. You can check this in action in the “How it Works” part of the video.

We programmed in Max/MSP and Arduino. For controlling the hardware, we used an Arduino-based microcontroller called Music & Motors (check the photo below on the right) developed by CIID.

This project was made by Hideaki Matsui and I (Andrew Spitz) in a class on Haptics at CIID run by Bill Verplank and David Gauthier.

WTPh? (What the Phonics) is an interactive installation made by Momo Miyazaki and I (Andrew Spitz). Street names in Denmark are close to impossible for foreigners to pronounce, so we did a little intervention in the touristic areas of Copenhagen.

We recorded a Danish person speaking the street names then split up each syllable. In true karaoke style, we placed lights above the matching syllable so that in real-time, you can see which part of the word is being spoken. When participants lift the speaker off the wall, it starts playing. We used Max/MSP and Arduino to build the installation.

Here’s a video about the process and showing WTPh in action. Enjoy!

This project was made during the Systems and Layers module at CIID and was run by Adam Greenfield and Engin Ayaz.

The music we used, is by the amazing artist Jacob Montague. The track is Lambent from the album Fly On.

#theVELUXpose is an interactive installation for VELUX set in the streets of Copenhagen. VELUX specializes in roof windows and our brief was to inspire young urban citizens to see the roof as an opportunity space and aspire to one day own a roof window. Our goal was to connect the digital generation and the VELUX brand.

As a symbol, we used the posture people have when looking through these roof windows, which is looking up at an angle of 125º. We brought this experience from the roof, down down to the streets and used Instagram as a way to get people excited and involved. It was amazing to see everyone so keen to take part. Thanks to all that did!

We put an iPhone in a box with a frame that has VELUX written on it so that it would come up as the border in the image. We hacked together a really long handsfree kit cable to be able to trigger the camera from far. The image gets synced with an iPad for participants to upload their image to Instagram with their own filter.

The video explains it all and shows it in action:

This interactive campaign was made by Kat Zorina and I (Andrew Spitz) for VELUX as a part of an industry project at CIID run by Jamie Allen.

You can check out the pictures we got during the few hours we did the installation, it’s under the instagram tag #theVELUXpose.

Here are some of our favorite:

What Line is it Anyway? explores the way people interpret an adjective through the simple task of drawing a line. We crowd sourced 1300 people to draw us a line by using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is an amazing platform to get people (called workers) to do a simple task without them knowing the bigger picture or context.

We asked each worker to draw us a line from ‘start’ to ‘finish’, the only other information we gave them was that they had to do it according to an adjective. For example, we asked them: “Draw a spiky line”. Each worker got paid 2 U.S dollar cents.

We used Processing to programme the online drawing tool and stitch it all together for the video. Max/MSP/Jitter was used to create some pre-visualisations, run some tests and do some list processing.

This project is made by Andrew Spitz (me) and Umesh Janardhanan and was part of the Data Visualization module at CIID, run by Golan Levin. Thanks to Marcin Ignac for his help.

Interesting facts:

Average Time Spent on a Drawing:

creative Line: 55 seconds
smooth Line: 70 seconds
spiky Line: 42 seconds
straight Line: 38 seconds

Collective length of lines (about 150 participants per adjective) :

Spirally Line: 39 meters
Straight Line:  21 meters
Wild Line: 44 meters
Smooth Line: 20 meters

This picture below is from when we were figuring out the logic, geometry and most importantly trying to communicate with each other.

Haven creates an analog soundscape by harvesting the wind. The goal was to create a personal space for relaxation while protecting the user from the wind.

Haven consists of arm sleeves that collect air flow through pipes of varying lengths and materials, and a head piece that acts as an analog speaker. The wind is funneled through tubes that connect the arm sleeves to the head piece. The sounds are naturally amplified by the pipes and exit through the tunnels in the head piece and into the ears.

This was a project part of the Performative Design module at CIID. Thanks to David Gauthier and Di Mainstone for their assistance in this project. Project by Andrew Spitz, Kat Zorina and Kenneth Aleksander Robertsen.  

We love a good old LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator), right? But what about the toilets?

I recently moved to Denmark, and almost all the toilets have lfö written on them. Actually, until writing this post I thought these toilets were a brand called lfö but it turns out it’s ifö. Regardless, I present to you this Instagram series of #lfö toilets.

If you want to connect on Instagram, my username is AndrewSpitz.

There are other Instagramers getting involved, so far there is Minipagura and razsadeq. So if you come across some lfö toilets, snap and tag

phonoLapse is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that lets you create audio time-lapses. For the 2010 Enterferenze New Art Festival I put together a little Time Lapse Phonography piece that followed me over the course of 24 hours (check the video below). I have been receiving emails from people wanting to create their own, and decided to work on a standalone version so you too can create some time-lapse phonography .

Please let me know if you have any issues.

In case you fancy making crazy long files, the max size of your final sound can be 7 minutes. Also, there’s always a chance it might bomb out after you’ve been recording for days (and that would be sad), so to be safe you can export every now and then and select “continue recording” in the popup.

I love seeing/hearing what you create with it, so swing me a link if you do something! It’s really exciting to see what people get up to with my apps!

me, doing this. is a programme built in Max/MSP that visualizes myself programming this programme to visualize myself programming… Yip, coding inception.

In realtime (while coding), I collect the mouse data (screen position, mouse down, mouse up), and whether or not I’m currently working or procrastinating. The white lines are when I’m working (the patcher in focus), and the red lines are when I’m procrastinating (patcher not in focus). Each dot represents a mouse down, and the brighter they are, the more clicks that have happened in that area.

The total project took 9h15m10s to code. I spent 62% of the time working on it, and 38% doing other stuff. A total of 666,207 lines of data with a timestamp were recorded and played back at superman speed.

This was part of a small afternoon project for a data visualization class at CIID, run by Golan Levin.