Coursework, notes, and progress while attending NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)

Author Archives: jas920

The Ancients

For my final project I wanted to explore the relationship between magic, mythology, & ritual and scientific & technological advancement. My final piece was something of a museum exhibit but from the perspective of a new species of human evolved from homo sapiens that migrated from earth after its destruction. I hoped to raise questions about […]

360 photos and aframe.js

At some point I’d like to play with compositing, and I recently saw some great examples using the aframe javascript library. To try it out, I put some sample images taken with the Ricoh Theta online. It took me a while to realize this, even with the javascript console yelling at me that the images […]

Projection mapping: Popcorn & Vomit

Having never projected any video, let alone on a bright New York City street, I took special note of the fact that in class the video that looked best projected was very bright and high contrast. But feeling uninspired by the light, animation, architectural illusions, and EDM that seem to largely accompany the medium, I […]

Barren Island History VR documentary

Fascinated by the community that inhabited Barren Island when it was the main dumping ground for New York City’s garbage, I decided to experiment with VR and the Ricoh Theta at Dead Horse Bay, where refuse from the era still washes up on the beach. While many people have heard of Dead Horse Bay, I […]

Video portrait

Tasked with creating a video portrait of a stranger using only still photos, my personal goal was to learn how to take photos with a 5D camera. My focus was on the experience of a protester. The timing of the assignment coincided with a new wave of Black Lives Matters protests across the country in response […]

A History of NYC Recycling & Labor

Link to timeline. Conflict I want to figure out what the forces are driving both the independent collectors of recyclables and those pushing for greater enforcement of rules around theft, because I think it will shed light on larger questions around recycling streams in dense urban areas and waste management policy. Stakeholders The Department of […]

Baidu Security Holes

A recent article and report on privacy security issues with the Baidu browser raised questions around government influence that encourages the release of unsafe software into the hands of consumers, and the related issues of encryption, and data collected by search engines more broadly. In the U.S., the debate around encryption has put producers, who are generally pro-encryption, and government […]

NYC Garbage Distribution and Disposal

Link to map. Data Sources I used this GeoJSON of NYC Community Districts and Joint Interest Areas from nyc.gov. I did not include “Joint Interest Areas, a/k/a JIAs, are public parks, waterways, major governmental installations and similar land uses which are not located within bounding community districts. Examples are Central Park, Van Cortlandt Park, LaGuardia and JFK […]

User Testing

This week I tested my paper prototype of my counter application, which I did iterate once based on one person’s feedback. I realized as I tested that I probably should have made empty screens, since the pre-populated ones that showed functionality seemed to confuse people. I asked three of my coworkers and my parents to […]

Information problems: Connectivity in Somalia

This week’s focus was on information problems in conflicts: How do actors establish ground truth and assess biases in sampling and among sources when there are competing narratives? Conflicts in Somalia and Hawaii served as case studies, although our solution is specific to Somalia. Slides after slide 12 demonstrate some of our thinking before further […]