lithium flowers bloom » Week6

Response to Understanding Media

L.J — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:10:20 +0000

I was usually slow in reading assignment not only because I read really slowly but also that it’s so easy to get me distracted from reading a book especialy while the laptop is on (for looking up words in the dictionary! seriously!). There was a fantastic stop motion animation which perfectly described my situation and I still love it. (Watch “Procrastination” by John Kelly.)

[end of procrastination]

Fairly speaking I’m doing much better with this book (than, of couse, Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I never post my response yet since I haven’t finished. It’s sad but I’m sure I would finish some day before the end of this semester ), and I really appreciated the chapter of “Media Hot and Cold”.

The “medium is the message” idea is like widely accepted these days. It feels like tendency that the medium itself becomes the point and (some) people are tending not to care about the “content”. Now we have an explanation fair enough that this is the message itself. Several years back almost all governmental departments are setting up websites just to follow the hype of “e-government”. So did education instititions with e-education thing. It’s more like a fashion to toss everything online and they made their point. But one thing I’m not sure about is that while the medium becomes the message, where should we look for the real/traditional content other than the manipulated message? Maybe have to be in a traditional medium?

The categorizing of media into cold and hot looks surprisingly practical. I’m totally in with the definition that “hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition’ … the state of being well filled with data”. It’s interesting that radio was categorized as the hot media maybe it’s just “cooling” down after 60s.

While I’m thinking of categorizing the Web 2.0 hype and traditional Web 1.0 era online mediums, it’s becoming hard to get to a conclusion. The old school websites are static and scattered, and they required the visitors to “look into depths” and to compile the information themselves. It fulfills the definition of “cool media” of being low-fi and participation-required. Web 2.0 seems to be a bit confusing. The core value being collaboration and share, the Web 2.0 online services are looking for much more participation from their users, are they cool media then? My answer is no. The seemingly participation takes place at the production end of the media, at the broadcasting end these medias are definitely hi-fi and overwhelming for the perceivers. That’s why we are more and more bugged by the “information overload” and have to find a way out of there.

I especially like the ending statement of the chapter that:

So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

I started a website in early 2007 for people to share their dreams. With the other cofounder we set up some basic principles of the website that 1) we moderate all submissions other than completely open sharing, 2) we do not encourage people to interprete the dreams in any form of “sign reading” or whatever. It now seems that we created a super “cold” media back then, and it would be wonderful if people get hallucination from our site.

Visualizing Smell: Acquire and Parse

L.J — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:35:19 +0000

I spent the whole afternoon today writing some very ugly codes to extract the space gradient and larvae path data from the original xml file and it’s almost done. I’m now able to sketch with the raw data and have my own first visual impression on the data:

Next steps:

Performance!!! current performance is too poor for real user interaction. data optimization is highly required for this case. will cover in the filter and mine phase;
Find out appropriate presentation for data elements as well as GUI elements. All visual elements are subject to change;
Interactions: custom grouping and filtering, capability of exploring into time

PCom Update: multiple serial input

L.J — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:11:52 +0000

I’ve been mostly working on viz class and pcom mid term over the weekend. One big thing is I once made the eight-buck-deal RF Link work in the studio, but never succeeded in testing again since I went back to the dorm. I used software serial library to utilize digital pins as serial input/output and leave the original serial port for computer monitoring, but the RL Links still feel like a black box to me. The transmitter side looks working perfectly while I hooked up a USB cable and tried to read the TX stream, however the receiver side keeps getting rubbish data. More efforts are to be invested on this issue!!

Just a quick update on the multi-serial-input, shown as the video below (yes I still love my force sensors):

It’s pretty simple, just using two serial inputs. But the concept of encoding data and protocol is pretty clear.

Arduino Code:

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int leftPin = 4;
int rightPin = 5;
int leftValue,rightValue;

void setup()
{
beginSerial(9600); //set up communication back to pc
}

void loop()
{
leftValue = analogRead(leftPin);
rightValue = analogRead(rightPin);

//if (abs(leftValue - rightValue) > 50)
//{
Serial.print(leftValue,DEC);
Serial.print(44,BYTE);
Serial.print(rightValue,DEC);
Serial.print(44,BYTE);
Serial.println();
//}
}

Processing Code:

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import processing.serial.*;

Serial myPort;
String data;
int leftValue = 0;
int rightValue = 0;

void setup()
{
size(800, 600, P3D);
directionalLight(126, 126, 126, 0, 0, -1);
ambientLight(102, 102, 102);
noStroke();
myPort = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[0], 9600);
ellipseMode(CENTER);
}

void draw()
{
background(0);
float leftR = map(leftValue,0,1023,0,PI/2);
float rightR = map(rightValue,0,1023,0,PI/2);

translate(width/2, height/2);

rotateX(-PI/12);
rotateZ(rightR - leftR);
stroke(160,10);
fill(150,150,150,90);
box(500,10,100);
translate(0,10);

noStroke();
fill(255,0,0);
translate(map(rightValue - leftValue,-1023,1023,-250,250),-25);
sphere(10);
}

void serialEvent(Serial p) {
String input = p.readStringUntil(10); //make sure you return (Ascii 13) at the end of your transmission
if (input != null)
{
String[] parts = input.split(","); //this will only work if you put commas (Ascii 44) between things in your transmission

if (parts.length >= 2)
{
//println("Raw Input: " + input);
if (abs(int(parts[0]) - leftValue) > 10)
{
leftValue = int(parts[0]);
}
if (abs(int(parts[1]) - rightValue) > 10)
{
rightValue = int(parts[1]);
}
}
}
}