Category: Computers for the Rest of You

This is a project I worked on with Kati London and Sai Sriskandarajah.

Inspired by the idea of observing personal space and stress in the urban environment, Urban Sonar is a wearable system that logs and visualizes proximity and heart rate over the course of a day.

Four Maxbotix Ultrasonic Range Finders are mounted in the front, back, and shoulders of a hooded sweatshirt, measuring the proximity of people and objects on all sides of the body.

Four conductive fabric leads, stemming from the Polar Heart Rate Monitor, are strapped around the fingers to measure pulse.

The rest of the electronic components are housed in a pocket inside the sweatshirt at the small of the back.

Sensor data is fed into the Arduino board which then interprets it and sends it serially to the BlueSMiRF device. The BlueSMiRF then sends the data via bluetooth to a Nokia N80 mobile phone where it is logged using Dan O’Sullivan’s Logger midlet.

Once the log is complete, it is uploaded to a server where it is interpreted in a time-based visualization made in Processing. (Hit the start button below to see visualization.)

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com

I’m interested in the subtleties of what we perceive and also of the information that we put out into the world. I’m also interested in traces of ourselves that we unconsciously leave behind. Once I made 10 people I was close to take pictures of their unmade bed every morning for 30 days. I like to think about ritual and routine and the simple choices that we make in intimate spaces that make generic rituals uniquely ours. The thing about people is that they have the potential to be so incredibly observant and they can know the ins & outs of another person so well. No matter how many preferences I set, my computer will not know me or the ebb and flow of my personality and mood. And I’ve been thinking about connections that can be made within a network of people – group datalogging. Obviously completely impractical & creepy & infringing, but what if there were a way to ‘watch’ a group of people in a given space at a given time, to ‘watch’ the day of everyone who is close to you and compare it to yours? Or else a comparison between you and all of those strangers that you end up sharing your physical space with in the course of the day. This morning I was in an insanely crowded subway car and at 8:46 we stopped for the 9/11 moment of silence. It was so odd to be so physically close to all those people and have no clue as to what sort of experience they were having. What would a graph look like for each of us for that period of time? How were our experiences similar or different, and how could that be observed?