Yesterday I was treated to a viewing of the brilliant thesis film of Yfke van Berckelaer, called Zombie Love.
It’s essentially a musical about, as the title may suggest, a zombie in love. It is incredibly funny and well written and I enjoyed every second of it, including the hilarious ‘chilling with my girlfriend’ trailer. An absolute must see!
Find more info on http://www.zombielovethemovie.com/ and please support Yfkes artistry by ordering a copy!
Johnny Lee gave us a taste of his brilliance by sharing his experiments in which he uses a simple Wii remote to create a low cost multi touch display either on a surface or in thin air as you see in the movie Minority Report.
Check out his website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
All I can say is: “WOW!”
Mark Feldman felt (and who doesn’t) that Virtual Console games on Wii are experienced much better when played with their original controllers, so what did he do? He converted original NES and SNES controllers to wireless versions, compatible with the Nintendo Wii! And he even put up a website to show us how it’s done. See links below.
Mark Feldman’s tutorial website:
http://www.ppl-pilot.com/
Demo video:
Take a look at this brilliant bird, the Lyre Bird. It imitates anything it hears: other birds, but also camera shutters, car alarms and even chainsaws!
In the last weekend of November, we attended the STRP festival with the ShameStation. That was a lot of fun and we were pretty popular, with curious people coming to see what this ‘game’ was. During these four days of fun we were also spotted by Bright, who immediately wanted us on the BrightLive festival. It seems that the star of the ShameStation is on the rise 
Here’s two videos showing the ShameStation in action on STRP festival:
ShameStation on STRP
Bright’s compilation video of STRP festival
I have finally finished my portfolio, which can now be found online at www.rockabit.com/projects or by following the link at the top of the page.
In the coming period I will be adding images for all projects, as well as more content and filtering functionality.
Please enjoy reading about my work
Phew, I just helped a friend connect to a WiFi network with her Macbook Pro’s AirPort connection, and I’d like to share the solution here.
It appears that a lot of people have problems connecting to a wireless network with WEP security when using AirPort, as was my friend. It also appears that hardly anybody knows the fairly simple solution, so here goes.
First of all, don’t type your password in regular ASCII text, but type the hexadecimal value (you can translate between the two here). But that’s not all, you have to also add ‘0x’ in front of the password! So let’s say your password is ‘mario’ then in the AirPort settings you type the following password: 0×6D6172696F and you should be able to connect.
If you’ve encountered this problem and found this solution to work, please share it so everybody will know what to try when they get that magnificently detailed message: “There was an error joining the AirPort network”
Experimentation week is over! I have all the data I need for my graduation research, so now it’s on to the data analysis phase. I’m glad my girlfriend knows statistics, ’cause I don’t and even for her it’s hard to keep an overview, that’s how much data I have.
Also, it’s no longer necessary to keep quiet about the goal of my research so here’s the skinny:
in psychology there’s a theory, called the James-Lange theory of emotion, which states that emotions are a result, rather than a cause, of certain physiological events. As William James put it: you do not run away from a bear because you are afraid, you are afraid because you run. From this theory you can deduce that it should be possible to trigger, or at least stimulate, an emotion by inducing the associated physical state. And it was at this point that I thought: “Well, why not use that in entertainment?” So for almost a year now, I’ve been working on a way to do this and now I’ve created a chair that influences you physically while you’re watching a movie, in order to enhance your emotions and make the whole thing more immersive.
There are several ways in which my “emochair” (working title ;)) influences you. First of all, it changes position by putting the back of the seat upright into a tense position, or backward for relaxation. Secondly, it generates a vibration at the speed of your pulse, only slightly faster or slower so that your heart will adjust to that rhythm, again making you more stressed or more relaxed. And finally it influences your temperature: the back is fitted with heating pads that can increase the temperature and a fan can blow cool air into your neck. All this tries to nudge your emotions in a certain direction, which I have now tested on a total of 20 subjects.
I have yet to analyze the data, but one thing is clear already: it definitely has it’s flaws. It’s obviously a first prototype and I’m hardly an expert when it comes to electronics, so the physical manipulations weren’t exactly inconspicuous. Ideally you wouldn’t really consciously notice the chair doing anything, but as it was the back of the seat went from neutral to either position in five seconds, the motor that simulated a heartbeat was clearly audible and the fan ended up producing a high pitched whine. But while the chair has its share of shortcomings, I’ve learned a ton about electronics and I haven’t yet ploughed through all the data so who knows, something may have worked…
Anyway, it’s been fun doing this and now I’ll see what the actual effect has been. It’s almost nerve wrecking 
When I was working on the software for my graduation project, I found I needed a way for Processing and Arduino to communicate safely, so that no messages would be overwritten, lost or sent in the wrong order. To this end I wrote a messaging system, the code for which can be downloaded here: http://www.rockabit.com/downloads/message queueing.zip
It basically works like this: processing sends numerical messages to the arduino I/O-board over a serial connection. To ensure safe messaging, every message is preceded by another message that specifies the type of message that follows. Arduino then first receives this type identifier, knows what type of message should follow, and then receives that message and sends back a confirmation to let processing know that the message was received. Only when a message is confirmed will processing send the next message in line. Also, if a message is not received for 2 seconds, it is resent, and if resending has no effect then it is placed at the back of the queue to be tried again later on
Coming back from holiday means getting back to work, in my case on my graduation project, which has been eating most or all of my time for a while now. The end, however, is approaching and look how nicely the electronics are coming along! And to think that when I started this I had hardly a clue about how to build this kind of stuff. I like making myself proud… ;D
I won’t go into detail about the exact ins and outs of my graduation project now, but it’s a research concerning physical responses to watching video footage. Experiments are scheduled to start at the 17th of this month, if I can just manage to get some more test subjects… Anyway, the end is drawing near, and when it is here, I’ll be a Master of Science! Yay!!! 
