Animals Week 2 Homework

For my second homework assignment, I wanted to see if I could do a lot with a little. I’ve always admired the way that great character designers are able to create expressive characters without leaning on any of the visual cues we use to read human emotions (think: the lamps in Pixar’s Luxo Jr.), so I wanted to see if I could do something similar with my octopus character design. Of course, in order to communicate emotion using a character on a static page, I needed to add something, so I chose to anthropomorphize my octopus enough to add a set of eyebrows. I am pretty sure that octopuses don’t actually have eyebrows.

This octopus lives on the ocean floor. While it leads a fairly solitary life, it interacts, from time to time, with other bottom-dwellers like eels, crabs, lobsters and other octopuses. While it is adept at catching smaller prey, it is equally adept at hiding itself from predators (like sharks and humans), using both camouflage and its ability to squeeze into tight spaces.

Animals Week 1 Homework

The blue-ringed octopus is a manually dexterous creature. It is able to easily manipulate objects with its eight arms and suction grip. Docile unless provoked, the blue-ringed octopus is a threat to any animal that would try to attack it: it produces enough neurotoxin to kill 26 adult humans. In captivity, octopuses are known to be quietly crafty—they will sometimes sneak out of their enclosure at night, devour animals in other tanks and return to their own tank without leaving a trace.  

Photo of me demoing The 4D Pop-Up Book of Halloween at the 2011 ITP Winter show. Thanks to Spike McCue for the photo!

Above you’ll find a video demo for The 4D Pop-Up Book of Halloween, an augmented reality children’s book that I built as part of my research at NYU ITP. It’s a handmade pop-up book that’s embedded with a different QR code on each page. When the reader scans the codes using a webcam-equipped device and a companion Mac/Windows/Android application, it produces an animation onscreen that places the reader inside the story. My goal was to build a book that could bridge the gap between one-of-a-kind artifacts and purely digital experiences. This project was featured in the 2011 ITP Winter Show.

For my final project for my Physical Computing class, I built a magnetic swipe gumball machine. In order to receive a gumball, you need to swipe a magnetic stripe card (i.e. a credit card, subway card, student ID, etc.). The idea is that you’re buying a gumball without knowing what it’s going to cost you (personal information? money? a subway ride?). If you’re interested in learning about what went in to building this thing, you can read this detailed post over at my old ITP blog.