ambient jewellery and external listening devices

this week is my first week back on deck and what a week it has been already. in fact, i should have modulated my stress levels a little better 'cos i've fallen ill with a stupid sore throat/virus thing, right in the middle of doing some cool stuff.

and it's the cool stuff i wanted to chat about briefly.

media lab melbourne have their second sprint event on. for more info about what a sprint is, you should go to their site. it's pretty rad, and i was sad to have missed the last one.

but this one is just as rad, and a little more drop-in than the last one, so it means that i can still participate, even when i'm working and/or sick.

the two main projects that ended up happening were up my alley in two slightly different ways:

the first is a perspective changer, which is using sound/listening, rather the sight to alter the viewer's perspecitve. it comprises of a wearable headphone kit, including mobile accellerometer app (or inbuilt one) which controls an external microphone/transmission rig.



when i last saw the rig, it was on a lazy susan, with wooden struts and three servos controlling x, y and z axes. i can't wait to get back to the lab to check out where it's at now (like i said, shitty that i've become sick today).

the other project is a series of wearable data stream items, transferring data from magnetic activity, solar activity, earth tremors and underwater acoustics and visualising them in a physical form. we've been checking out solar flare twitter streams, earthquake twitter streams, aururo borealis streams and are holding back on the underwater one, but likely something to do with the geology of it all.

mechanically, we're working with a peltier chip (which gets really hot and really cold), vibration motors, ferro fluid and electromagnets, and a simple bell. they will become physical indicators of real time environmental data.

it's jess kilby's project, really, but because of my interest in wearables, i've enjoyed helping out. whilst jess sourced data streams that we could (fairly easily) scrape, yesterday i spent time making a database of how to connect the digital data streams into the analogue physical properties. what kind of mapping we'd need to do, what we'd take and how it would convert into input/outputs. it's all starting to make a little more sense to me now, thanks to just a little play time.

(hopefully there's more play time coming up and i can transfer the skills and the time over into the wearable sound works that i've been hoping to dev for a while.)