Mauricio Giraldo

Description
2D ♥ 3D is a Kinect-based online multiuser interactive environment. The project is still under development and currently allows multiple web-based users to interact with and augment the physical space of the Kinect participants with virtual objects.

This project was done as part of the requirements to complete the Spring 2011 Interactive Art and Computational Design course with Professor Golan Levin in Carnegie Mellon University.

Category
Kinect-based interaction / Multiuser Experience
Client
Personal / Carnegie Mellon University
Date
2011
Technical skills required
OpenFrameworks, Flash, XMLSockets

More information
Blog post describing the project process

Description
New Faces is a project that began in 2009 after I got fed up with Colombia’s online newspapers’ (one site, another site) high emphasis in sports and celebtrity-related news. I decided to take a screenshot of the offending website and remove this information (along with advertising) in order to see what was left.

Clearly sports, advertising and celebrity news have a relatively high importance for this colombian newspaper (at least in its online incarnation). This led me to wonder if this was the same across different countries. I decided to create a Python script that makes use of webkit2png-0.5 to take a screenshot of eleven news websites every night at 8pm. This script has been ran almost every night since November 8, 2009.

After seeing Rutherford Chang’s work with the New York Times where he blacks-out every element in the page except faces (no link available, sorry) I thought it would be an interesting idea to execute this same process in my dataset of more than 3,000 files and 10 GB.

View the Flash interface online in your browser. F for fullscreen (click the interface to give it focus). CAUTION: ~30,000 images files loaded might clog up your browser (although they’re about 2kb each only). Interface is not optimized for low-end computers.

This project was done as part of the requirements to complete the Spring 2011 Interactive Art and Computational Design course with Professor Golan Levin in Carnegie Mellon University.

Category
Data visualization
Client
Personal project / Carnegie Mellon University
Dates
2011
Technical skills required
Processing, Python, OpenCV, Flash, ActionScript

More information
Blog post describing the project process
PDF Presentation (1.5MB)

Description
Social network services[1] enable people to communicate with each other in ways that would be considered science fiction only a few years ago. This enablement has been welcome by people at large, with some criticisms concerning personal privacy and how well (or not) the networks they model reflect real life (offline) relationships. socially nervous is a commentary on how these services have affected our way we perceive these relationships.

The object
An electronic “pet” with movement and audiovisual actuation capabilities. The pet will communicate wirelessly with a host computer which in turn will receive information from the owner’s personal “identities” in two social network services: Facebook and Twitter. Only incoming information to these profiles will be taken into account (information generated by the user’s “friends”).

This information will be manifested physically by the pet’s behavior (movement, sound, light). As information is accumulated by the pet, manifestations become more intense and erratic. As soon as someone touches the pet, it “forgets” any information stored and “sleeps”. The process begins again as soon as physical contact is lost.

Awkwardness
The pet's shape is informed by the awkwardness inherent in the process of virtual socialization. The object could easily be a teddy bear or some other more familiar shape which would make the observer want to interact with it. Instead, I decided to create a non-familiar, even agressive, shape with sharp edges and non-symmetrical shape. An observer would notice an erratically-behaving object wandering about in response to virtual interactions. By touching it, the user "calms" the pet; physical interaction "defeats" virtual interaction.

Behavior states
Any information received by the pet will provoke behaviors in any of these types: physical, visual, auditive. The stimulus is always represented in the 5×7 matrix as an icon followed by the username/alias of the person who provoked it.

A video of the behaviors working (indirect stimulus received via Bluetooth from a computer not in video). Initial/passive message was later changed to “please hug me”:

Part list

• 1 x Wiring Mini
• 1 x Generic PCB Protoboard
• Several Break away headers (straight)
• 1 x Capacitive sensor board
• 1 x 3.3V regulator
• Lots of F/F jumper wires
• 2 x snap action switch
• 3 x super bright red LED
• 1 x 100μF capacitor
• 2 x standard LED
• 7 x 100Ω resistor
• 2 x 10KΩ resistor
• 1 x BlueSmirf antenna
• 2 x DC motor
• 1 x Lite-on LTP 747 5×7 LED matrix
• 1 x vibration motor
• 1 x buzzer
• 9V battery (although I later learned this battery should be avoided for this type of project)

I used 3mm laser-cut acrylic for the box (Sketchup 3D file).

A Processing-based visual interface will be developed to manage Facebook and Twitter profile settings.

This project was done as part of the requirements to complete the Fall 2010 Making Things Interact course with Professor Mark Gross in Carnegie Mellon University.

Category
Tangible computing
Client
Personal project / Carnegie Mellon University
Dates
2010
Technical skills required
Wiring, Processing, Twitter API, Facebook API

More information
Project presentation (PDF 2.7MB)
Making things interact Fall 2010 Course Blog

Description
iOS (iPhone/iPod Touch) card-based game created as part of personal research interest in mobile platforms. Conceived and built from scratch in Objective-C, this game is now for sale in the Apple App Store.

Category
Game design / Mobile development
Client
Personal / Ping Pong Estudio
Date
2010—2011
Technical skills required
Objective-C, Cocoa Touch

Description
I was invited by my colleagues Hernando Barragán and Annelie Franke to collaborate with the Thought Factory, a project that started in their Design Studio 6 course for the second semester 2009. The project was commisioned by the XII Iberoamerican Theatre Festival in Bogotá, one of the most important festivals of its type in the world. The idea was to create a collaborative work that would allow people to interact with the festival.

With this in mind, the Thought Factory was created and its main purpose was to save and classify the thoughts of festival visitors. Thoughts are abstract and intangible notions (we can’t read minds… yet). The Factory was made to make those thoughts somewhat tangible, “saving” them in bottles that can later be opened and their contents made visible as the genius in the lamp.

Each bottle represents an inquiry made by festival organizers. Every hour and a half a new bottle is placed in the filling station. From that moment, and during the next ninety minutes, that bottle will be filled with thoughts from people who type them in the input stations. Thoughts can also be sent as an SMS message via mobile phone.

Since the Festival is for all ages it was necessary to curate these thoughts (basically removing obscenities). Once approved, the message enters the bottle in the filling station. When removed from the filling station, the bottle is labelled and placed with the rest of the full bottles so its thoughts can be read in the viewing station.

At the end of the Festival (in april 4, 2010) there will be sixty bottles full of thoughts that can be read in the project website.

My main tasks were developing the visual interfaces (thought input, thought curating, filling station, bottle visualization), the database that manages thoughts and inquiries and all communication happening between these and the bottles. SMS message service was kindly provided by Contacto SMS.

If you are curious about the tech side of the project: interfaces are made with Adobe Flash which communicate with a MySQL database via PHP and AMFPHP. Filling and viewing stations communicate with the bottles via Wiring using sockets and an RFID tag. ActionScript programming was made in FDT.

Category
Tangible computing / Interaction design
Client
Universidad de los Andes Design Studio
Date
2010
Technical skills required
PHP, MySQL, Flash, Flash Remoting, ActionScript, Wiring

More information
Design Studio 6 website
Description and videos in my blog

Description
Contacted by Zemoga Inc to develop an Adobe Flash version of their 2009 website. Design and interaction was created by Zemoga and delivered to me as Adobe Illustrator wireframes and Quicktime animations. The site allows deep linking (via SWFAddress), programatic animation (via GTween and custom scripts) and database integration (via AMFPHP, PHP and MySQL). A back-end system was developed in PHP and MySQL to update the site.

Category
Programmatic animation and interaction
Client
Zemoga Inc.
Date
2009
Technical skills required
PHP, Flash, ActionScript

Description
For a long time I wanted to do a videogame history timeline. It would combine several of my interests: information visualization, history, time and, of course, videogames. I developed this timeline as a reference tool for a lecture I taught in the Design Department at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). The information is stored in Drupal CMS and accessed by the interface via AMFPHP.

Made with the valuable support from Powerflasher GmbH, makers of FDT.

Category
Data visualization
Client
Personal project
Target audience
Anyone interested in videogames and their history
Impact
Thousands of visitors from around the globe. Showcased in several technology and game-oriented blogs.
Dates
2010
Technical skills required
Drupal CMS, PHP, Flash, ActionScript

More information
Blog post describing the project process
Blogs and websites that have taken interest in the project.

Description
Individual online marketing campaigns and activities developed around the concept of "couple". The first one aimed to create romantic links among individuals; the second was a videogame tournament for couples with simple, custom-created multiplayer games; the third allowed users to create DUO-stories from photographs uploaded by them.

Roles
Creative Director
Lead Designer

Category
Branding / Advertising
Client
Beiersdorf/BDF Andina
Dates
2006—2007
Impact
16,000+ registered users, 32,000+ photographies created and sent, 300+ stories generated
Technical skills required
PHP, MySQL, Flash, Flash Remoting

Description
Online "AXE experience" for 18-25-year-old male consumers to help the local launch of the AXE brand. This development required a team of programmers, designers and copywriters. The result after just a few months was an online community of more than 80,000 users (it is worth reminding that this was more than seven years ago in a developing country).

Roles
Creative Director
Lead Designer
Lead Developer

Category
Branding / Advertising
Client
Unilever
Dates
2003—2005
Impact
80,000+ registered users
Technical skills required
PHP, MySQL, Flash, ActionScript

Description
Design, development and implementation of a consumer-level service website for Telecom (Colombia's largest telecommunications company) in 2004. Led a team that developed one of the first CSS-standards-based sites for a high profile company in the country. The key challenge in this project was developing a visual framework that would be clear but also engaging, being consistent with the restructuring and image reinvention the company was undergoing at the time.

Roles
Creative Director
Lead Designer

Category
Content and Community portal
Client
Colombia Telecomunicaciones / Telecom
Dates
2004
Impact
20,000+ registered users with their own blogs
Technical skills required
HTML, PHP, MySQL, CSS

Description
This project supported the first colombian expedition to summit at Mount Everest. The expedition was sponsored by Manantial water (a brand owned by Femsa, the country's Coca-Cola bottler). The website served as a means of communication between expeditioners in Nepal and expedition supporters around the globe.

Roles
Creative Director
Lead Designer
Lead Developer

Category
Web based community
Client
Femsa
Dates
2001—2002
Impact
3,000+ registered users interacting with expeditioners
Technical skills required
HTML, PHP, MySQL, Flash, ActionScript