mehan's itp blog

HTML 5 FISHTANK

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:40:07 -0500

My week 4 homework for HTML 5. No fish were harmed during the making of this novelty web application.

MEMEMAKER

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:30:59 -0500

This is my week 4 homework assignment for Dynamic Web. Built using NodeJS, Express and Bootstrap. Based off of John Schimmel’s Valentine Card Maker.

Animals week 3 assignment: the octopus in visual culture

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:15:28 -0500

The octopus in visual culture (text) (PDF)

The octopus in visual culture (slides) (PDF)

Animals Week 2 Homework For my second homework assignment, I...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:07:33 -0500

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...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:19:00 -0500

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.

Dynamic Web Week 3 Homework Assignment

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:31:10 -0500

Dynamic Web Week 3 Homework Assignment

Dynamic Web Week 2 Homework Assignment

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:37:35 -0500

Dynamic Web Week 2 Homework Assignment

dynamic web project idea: instagram --> tumblr

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:25:03 -0500

For the last few days, I’ve struggled to come up with a compelling idea for a project for my Dynamic Web class. Ultimately, I decided that instead of worrying about what might be useful/interesting/zeitgeisty, I should just build a web application that I myself would use. So here’s the idea that I settled on: an application that automatically sends posts that appear in your Instagram stream to your Tumblr dashboard. While Instagram has an active community, at present, there’s no way to browse your Instagram stream other than via the official iPhone app and a handful of unofficial (and oftentimes buggy) web clients. Tumblr, meanwhile, has built an easy-to-use dashboard that’s ideal for browsing content in reverse-chronological order and my sense is that their userbase has a good deal of overlap with Instagram’s. My idea is to create a service that would ask the user to authenticate with both his/her Instagram and Tumblr credentials and would in exchange, automatically send content (i.e. photos and metadata) from the user’s Instagram stream to Tumblr. I’ve poked around a bit in the documentation for the Instagram and Tumblr APIs and while it’s not yet clear if it will be possible to build this sort of thing, hopefully, I will be able to figure out a way to make it happen over the course of the next few months.

Photo of me demoing The 4D Pop-Up Book of Halloween at the 2011...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:13:00 -0500

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...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:22:00 -0500

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...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:20:15 -0500

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.