blacklog

On May 16th John gave a farewell lecture to the Media Lab before joining RISD. While reviewing our theses for the last time before submitting them this morning, Mud, Kyle and I spent a few nights preparing a series of promotional posters for John’s talk.

My first Rails application. It only took me like a year to make one. It is a simple anonymous picture aggregator that features a tag system to organize the content in a picture-word network. Its architecture is as lightweight as possible to let the user look at pictures (or collect them) in the most direct possible way.

Several friends and I have been testing it from around a month and I have decided to put it out thanks to Brent’s wise advice, even though it is still incomplete. You can play with it here:

http://pixs.media.mit.edu/

I am working on adding pagination for the picture grid in the frontpage, and a reasonable way of sorting-browsing-searching through the tags.

…before your media eats you.

Cannibal Boy was created as the mascot for the PLW Cannibals. The PLW Cannibals are Kate, Kyle, guest cannibal Meg from the real world, and me. We teamed up to participate in a 24 hour build-a-prototype competition called prototype-a-thon that takes place every year during january in the Media Lab. The theme this time was about media and food. After a long night of think, design and code, we came up with eyeTaste, a computer vision augmented set of glasses that keeps track of what you eat, tries to control your habits by sending messages to an embedded display on the surface of the glasses, and loads data to a log of what you eat in a social networking web application, where you can examine your stats and correlate them with those of your friends. It’s Just another example of intrusive technology. During the competition, we were only beat by Brent’s team with their foodstckr project, and Takashi’s and Amber’s team with WeCook. Overall, PLW dominated the prototype-a-thon.

The website:

Callibrating the vision system:

Snapshot of Kate using the prototype glasses on an apple during the competiton: