September 25, 2010 0

Maker Faire 2010

By in Fall 2010

I spent the better part of today [Saturday] at Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. The hundreds of displays provided great examples of what is being done in technology today, as well as inspiration for future projects. Stay tuned for pictures, videos, and thoughts from the event. And if you didn’t make it today, make sure to check out the Faire tomorrow!

UPDATE
Alright, I promised a recap of the event, so here it is!

I started the day by visiting the Young Makers Tent, which included robotics and other technologies created by or for kids and teenagers. Two notable organizations doing great work for kids are Vision Education & Media and their Robofun after school workshops for children, and New Youth City, which is partly facilitated by Parsons. Both of these organizations are creating hands-on learning opportunities and activities for youth to get involved in technology. I enjoyed the simple and fun Drawbots presented by Parson’s own Jonah Brucker-Cohen. Small “robots”, created from plastic cups, a battery, and some markers, draw all on their own. My favorite exhibitions in this tent were the robots made by various NY area high school student groups. One of the students informed me about Breakaway, a robotics competition “Scrimmage” being held October 2 by the Francis Lewis High School Robotics Team. More information about the team and Breakaway can be found on their website. It was inspiring to see the bots created by these students and to hear from them about all of the hard work and fun that goes into building these projects.

Drawbots in Action – UPDATE: This is not Drawbots! I will find out the true project and creator name!

Drawbots from Tami on Vimeo.

Next, I visited the Maker Pavillion. Some projects of note include POWERleap, which collects energy from foot traffic using special flooring (very similar to Chen’s shoe-embedded power collecting idea!); Mini SAD-robot by Dustyn Roberts, which uses solar power to draw; how-tos provided by instructables.com; Rachel’s Electronics, a local electronics store run by my Physical Computing teacher, Joel Murphy; Fixers Collective; and 4MP, “a collaborative interactive music system,” created by Michael Chladil, a graduate of NYU’s ITP;

4MP –

4MP Collaborative Music System from Tami on Vimeo.

After waiting in line for nearly one hour to eat some delicious Papusas, I wandered around the rest of the tents. In the MakerShed, I soldered a souvenir button.

I was able to see two projects I have heard a lot about in the Parsons MFADT program:

The Windowfarms Project is to be included in my Interface professor’s, Zhang Ga, Zone of the Impending exhibit next year in China. The exhibit “explores artists’ interventions into the ecological crisis, proposing alternative strategies to the impending dangers that loom over human existence.” This project was created to allow city-dwellers to grow their own gardens in their apartment windows.

The EyeWriter is a collaborative project started to create eye-tracking, graffiti-drawing software for artist TEMPTONE. Diagnosed with ALS in 2003, Tempt1 is completely paralyzed except for his eyes. This opensource and low cost eye-tracking software will allow Tempt1 to express his art through his eyes, and will probably be expanded to be used in a lot of software in the future. I had the chance to demo the latest version of the software. While I was not able to keep still enough to allow the software to calibrate properly to my gaze, I was amazed by the accuracy and ease-of-use that others experienced during the demo. I will continue to excitedly follow the progress of this revolutionary project.

Victor trying out the latest EyeWriter software. The system was unable to calibrate to his eyes because of his “eyelashes.”

Other notable projects (in no particular order):

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