Geekcon projects - how are you going to participate?

project (Wikipedia): "project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. Temporary means that the project has an end date. Unique means that the project's end result is different than the results of other functions of the organization."

Geekcon is all about your projects. It can be a project you already did and want to show and talk about, it can be a half baked one that you want to complete with your fella geeks during geekcon or it can be an idea (like "the invisible handle" in geekcon 2005!)

Have some cool links you think can inspire? Edit the list to the right!?

IMPORTANT! Many projects are pending suggestions, which means they are awaiting participants to be launched (either at the camp or beforehand). That means that if you want a project to actually take place - add yourself to the participants list to indicate your interest. Please be active not passive!

For inspiration - see GeekCon 2008 projects here->

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Personal kong-fu sound effect generator

Participants: Person, Kobika, ...

It's fairly stupid, but must be done : you wave your hands around,

and the machine goes : "shhhhhhhhhbuuutchccchhhchchc !"

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Self propelled phones - a cellular engine

Participants: Yoav, someone who is better than Yoav at physics (since early experiments produce less than satisfactory results), ...

In tradition of developing stupid useless technologies, we will harness the power of cell-phone software-tunable vibrators.

Equipment: several phones, teflon, styrofoam...

 

Early experiments in low-friction setups (styrofoam on water, teflon on dry surface) produce moderate results. Physicist to the rescue?

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Who gave me the flu?!

Participants:  Kira Radinsky, Tal Muskal, Sagie Davidovich

Did you ever wake up with flu and wanted to know who the bastard that made you sick?

Now with the power of social networks we will show you who the friends that made you sick are. And if you are not sick, we will show you the hubs of the swine flu next to you.

Yes we can!!!!

Are they travelling to dangerous places? Were they tagged with sick people? Do they have a lot of sick dangerous friends?

We will use NLP to classify twitter messages of your friends, and your friends’ friends, and your friend’s friends’ friends (well you got the point…) – all just to keep you healthy!
 

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Lucy in the Skype

Participants:  Kobika,...

What would skype on LSD look like?

using a wabcam and kaleidoscopes we will try to answer this question. I think I can handle the video, but help is needed with distorting the audio in a cool way, and help in designing a cool GUI will be great. If anyone has a nice kaleidoscope this can help as well.

Tron comes to GeekCon
Participants:  Rafael Mizrahi, Dani Vardi, Yuval Sapir, Shachar Tal.

 

As always, mixing technology gaming and self embarrassment to the extreme.
Building a Tron costume and participate in a computer game which is projected on the stage.
A motion detection wide angle camera (recognizer) detects Tron and command the game to attack him. Tron maneuver at the scene to escape the fire and also fire back.

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Automatic fake twitter celebrity impersonator (AFTCI)

Participants:  Oded Sharon, Imri Goldberg (will help)

  

Details:

the AFTCI (Gesunthiet) will twitter as if a celebrity was actually twittering himself by randomly saying generic stuff and by posting twits and images it will find by searching the web.

Using Natural language proccessing we will search the celebrity in google, find pieces of information and then formatting them to 140 charaters and posting them on twitter. if the celeb already has a twitter account we might draw from it. We will also add some generic lines of our like "eating breakfest" if it is morning, and links to pictures of demi moore in her underwear.

I can use help from anyone with knowlegde in NLP or with google crawling.

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Pots n' Pans

Participants:  Alon Chitayat , Dori Adar, you

Details:

Pots n' Pans is a simple system to turn any cookware in your home kitchen into a midi controller
that triggers sound and video projection . By setting ones customized kitchen drum-set, the user is
invited to pre-record his own video sample for each of the pans. By linking each of the cookware
to a different video sample, the user can then create his own musical symphony that consist on
the real sound of the cookware, accompanied by the virtual video and audio which he selected.Pots n' Pans is a simple system to turn any cookware in your home kitchen into a midi controller
that triggers sound and video projection . By setting ones customized kitchen drum-set, the user is
invited to pre-record his own video sample for each of the pans. By linking each of the cookware
to a different video sample, the user can then create his own musical symphony that consist on
the real sound of the cookware, accompanied by the virtual video and audio which he selected. 

At the age of 6 i received my first sampler. It was a “CASIO-SK1” toy synth that came with a built in mic. My Parents actually wished that the new keyboard would rehab me from spreading all the pots and pans on the kitchen floor, drumming them nuts. But little did they know of the sampling feature that came with that blessed toy. This is the sort of sampler-toy you end up belching into with your friends and play burp-songs for a laugh...or so did I. Sampling, same as my cookware drum-set, offered me to customize my music instrument. concept: By creating an almost childish game of drumming on pots and pans, the user can play and create unique “music-video” instruments without any prior knowledge in music. Presentation: The presentation will consist of a variety of 5 pots and pans, each connected to a contact mic. A video camera will capture and save the video samples (loops). The user will then have the option to link each of the cookware, by software, to any of the prerecorded video samples that are stored on the “video-bank”. All of the video capturing and playing will be projected on a wall in front of the user. with every drum-hit, a pulse will trigger a midi controller on a computer that will then play the linked video. A projected split screen will show an ensemble were instead of different instruments the user will be conducting a beatbox concert. Each user can define his own “costume-set” of video samples and save it for other users to enjoy, thus contributing to the video-bank.

E-Mail:animishmish@gmail.com
Phone:0523444445

 

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 Robotic Orchestra Attempt #2

Participants:  Oded Sharon , Tom Sofer

Details:

Following up on on the garage geeks workshop for musical hardware we can attempt to connect more hardware musical instruments together with MIDI

Oded will bring his hard drive, and tom will bring his Baloon, you're welcome to join me.

also considering connecting the wiimote to the  music playing ocherstra to drive cratiing a new type of musicalintersction

and also considering connecting it all through midi to fireworks making automatic musical pyrotechnics - computer  controlled pyrotechnics (if it will be allowed to do outside)

 

Suggestion:

Use the WiiMote as a virtual conductor - the vibrations up and down can set the rhythm and the intensity can control the volume which makes the wiimote a perfect "sharvit" for the trainning conductor!

Ram

(Ram - feel free to join us to help, Oded)

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 3D Lunar Lander

Participants:  Itay Donenhirsch,  Dror Tirosh, Kobi Sambrano, Imri Goldberg (will help)

Details:

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo's moon landing, we're going to land our eagle on the moon... the famous "lunar lander" game now goes 3D - and in large scale

 

It's not a computer game. We're going to construct a real-life 3D lunar lander. our "moon face" will be the grass field outside the geekcon building (or a large hall inside), where you'll have to land the eagle safely on the harsh moon surface, before your fuel runs out...

The"magic" to make the spacecraft over in mid-air is a "reverse pyramid" of 3 ropes it is connected to. each rope is attached to a pulley and a motor, which make it fly freely in space.

 

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Automatic Improviser

 

Participants:  Imri Goldberg

Details:

A few years back I wrote a python guitar chord recognizer. What is needed now is to connect it to a beat recognizer, and some simple improvisation heuristics - and we got a solo-playing, hard-rocking guitar player.

What I already have:

1. Chord recognizer

2. ideas on how to do beat recognition

3. ideas on how to do improvisation in code

4. guitar(s)

 

Blog posts regarding the project are here: http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/index.php/tag/pyimprov/

Code is available here (check the blog posts regarding updates): http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/pyimprov 

 

Deburger

Participants:  Alon Kadury & Elad Shapira

Details:

It is a known fact that being in shape increases productivity. Programmers often work long hours, being stationary and operating only fingers and mouth muscles. This causes companies to face a dilemma, should I send my programmers to the gym to improve their health (thus increasing productivity), but lose precious work time? In this project we will try to come up with a solution in which programming will be more physical, hence the programmers will get into shape but will not leave the keyboard.

 

 

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Steering wheel-mounted drum machine 

Participants:   Guy Bendov

Details:

Research shows that 87.4f male drivers drum their steering wheel , especially while in traffic jams. While some mediocre drummers ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKL72DxeBYY ) are satisfied with the noise of leather like plastic getting bit, or just make their own noise ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikkx6a8WzOM ) we would like to have the real thing going. A full Steering wheel-mounted drum machine. Preferably connected to your in-car sound system. Now the idea is not entirely new ( http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Steering_20wheel-mounted_20drum_20machine ) but it is time someone will do it.

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"balloon piano" OR "liquid crystal thermometer color display"

Participants:   tom sofer

Details:

1. robot will play music on a balloon by pulling its 'mouth' with a motor. pressing a note on the keyboard will move the robot arm do the position for the desired sound. then it will analyze the sound using fft and provide feedback to achieve actual piano notes from the balloon. maybe more than one baloon will be used.  2. 40x40cm liquid crystal thermometer (like the one in aquariums) will be attached to peltier junctions (if i can find enough) which will control the colors as accurately as possible using temperature diff. this will create a 2x2 , 2x3 or 3x3 pixel display with colors like black, green, yellow, blue, and purple. if i get enough hardware i will do number 2. if not then number 1.

 

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ConAutoDoc

Participants: Amit Knaani, Yaniv Golan, Gil Dibner, Orit Hashay

Details:

An autonomous conference photo-geo-doc machine. In other words, an iRobot Roomba with a laptop, webcam and connectivity. The Roomba will travel the premises continuously. Every X seconds it will stop, announce, do a count-down, and then take a pic of whatever or whoever is in front of it.The result will be shared publicly in realtime, metadata and all.

  

So, who's got a Roomba??

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2D Snake Robot, 3D Snake Robot, Wall Climbing Robot

Participants: Amir Shapiro

Details:

I will bring a 2D Snake like robot and a 3D snake like Robot that crawls nicely on the ground. I will also bring a magnetic wall climbing robot, and hopefully a wall climbing robot that is based on hot melt glue. I may bring some other robots from my lab including the big Mule like robot. To see them just google Amir Shapiro you'l find all my projects.

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Web Dress

Participants:  Shiri Sandler

Details:

I will be making a wearable electronic outfit out of cloth, conductive thread, arduino board and various sensors. the purpose of this exercise is to add a web connectivity feature to the outfit via electronics and flash CS actionscript. the garment would have to be operated both via sensors and via computer interface.

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Flight Tent

Participants:  Eyal Hershko

Details:

Want some privacy during your flight? Want to feel like in privet plane? The answer for your dreams is our FT (Flight Tent)! The tent that effortlessly extended by himself. I will try to build a tent that will give some privacy to the passengers in one raw.

 

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Second Life Content Management System

Participants: Oren Itzcovitch

Details:

I have started a project of building "2nd Life" CMS(Content Management System). My aim is to be able to manage large scale 3D content inside second life world. Second life can be found at: http://secondlife.com/ The components I am working on are: 1) "C# agent" that makes soap connections to "2nd Life" world and acts as an "access point" for the CMS by routing "content management commands" to "2nd Life" world. 2) CMS - management console ( not started yet ) My project is in its very early stage ! * both components are not built from scrach and base on open source projects.

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Fish Stick

Participants:  Danny Strelitz

Details:

take the concept of ripstick and try to deploy it to an aquarium environment

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wallE!

Participants:  Shachar Mendel

Details:

little driving notty wallE! controlled via zigB , looking for other robots someone have that can communicate with us? Maybe even creat a shared robot playing ground!

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Pi?ata Workshop

Participants:  Igor Makarov

Details:

A workshop where people can design and build their own pi?ata, which is a type of Mexican pot decorated with paper and tinsel and filled with candy. It is then smashed open by children at birthday celebrations, showering the participants with candy. I intend to bring pieces of pottery and help people assemble them into pi?atas, fill them with candy, and then have a smashing contest.

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wii waldo

Participants:  Nimrod lehavi

Details:

it's a long story

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Hand Tracking Poker Table

 

Participants: 

Nadav Bruchiel, Daniel Orsher, Gil Mesterman,Oren Istrin, Irad Gilboa, Aviv Arnon, Maya Ben-Ari

Details:

A real poker table that tracks, keep record and later maybe even analyzes the hands that have been played on it.

Things like this have been done before, projects that took months, but we'll do this a little different and in short time.

 We will use image recognition to identify the cards and we also want to calculate and display each player's winning odds.

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Hive Mind Poker Player

Participants: Daniel Orsher, Nadav Bruchiel

 

Details:

Texas Hold'em has changed the face of poker, setting the focus on skill rather than chance. It is no coincidence that the best players in the world shine through thousands of amateurs and appear repeatedly in final tables of major tournaments. Amongst the millions of players playing online today there are quite a few who are skillful enough to become pros but lack the bankroll or commitment.

Each player has their own style, and their own strengths and weaknesses.

Imagine you could harvest the strengths of a collective of players into a single poker playing being, making its decisions based on the wisdom of the crowd.

That is precisely what we'd like to do, and we plan to use Twitter to do it.

Participating players will see the same hand, propose alternative courses of action and vote on the best action to take. Communication will be done using the Twitter platform, and the algorithms we plan to create will integrate the information collected from all the players and form a decision on the best play.

Players will be rated according to the consequences of their proposals and votes.

After time, the better players' votes will carry greater weight, thus improving the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Also, we will be able to tell how good a player is by simply querying the database.

 

Help welcome

If you have experience developing for Twitter and you love poker we'd like to see you with us on this project!

Contact us at djorsher@gmail.com or borg972@gmail.com

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Ham Radio Station

Participants: Itay Donenhirsch (4Z5TX), Oded Sharon(4X6NB), and any ham radio operator on the premises - add yourself here

Details:

We're going to errect a "portable" ham radio station on the premises. The probabale equipment will consist of a Drake TR-7 HF transceiver and the antenna will be a longwire or some sort of dipole made of wire. We'll try to make voice SSB connections on the 20m (~14MHz) and 40m (~7MHz) bands. any ham radio operator ("darga bet" and up) is welcome to join and make some QSOs.

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Air Guitar Hero

Participants: Ori Hanegby

Details:

We all know how to play the air guitar... let's put some skill into it! We can also try to add air drum kit and make an air rockband.

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Electric Unicycle

Participants: Yuval Yohai

Details:

Going on the Israeli train at rush hours with your brand new Segway  is not very practical, to say the least, yet if we could narrow its width into one wheel ...well that could be a breakthrough ...

 

I have a bicycle wheel with a 200W inwheel motor, still need though a 24V/36V driver for it and an accelerometer.
If anyone can get a hold of such things even for only one weekend, it could be wonderful.

Still in need for people with mechanical skills to help me build its surroundings.

In case you want to participate or help or you have the relevant parts please contact me.

yuval at lab-tunes dot com

 

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Painted Photosynth

 

Participants: Tal Yaniv

Details:

Photosynth is a great experience. It does a great job analyzing camera-taken images. But how intelligent would it be with human painted images? Painting tripods, paintbrushes and colors will be spread at the venue. Each participant will be able to paint a scene. We will scan and upload the the images to photosynth - let's see what happens!

 

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"Matrix-style" bullet time photo studio - with USB webcams

 

Participants: Eden Shochat, Ilan Graicer

taking a simultaneous shot from up to 16 webcams to create a bullet time effect ( XML to create a movie from it). everybody's invited to try it out (when we have it working).

lots of technical stuff to do with drivers for multiple cameras and USB limitations on length and timeouts.... 

 

 

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USB Catapult

 

Participants: Cnaan, Ori, Roy

Exactly how it sounds. A mini-catapult controlled by USB.

 

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Mass Crowd Controlled Flight Simulator

 

 

Participants: Cnaan, Ori, Roy

A flight simulator for the masses, Controlled by the whole crowd watching using USB Camera and color detection for right / left etc'

 

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Drive-Chord-Ion

Participants: Sagie Davidovich, Dror Gill (in Spirit only), Eitan Shefer

Note: This project may be combined with Guy Ben-Dov's Steering Wheel Drum Machine project

When you drive your car and hear a favorite song on the radio, do you sometime have the urge to play along? The Drive-Chord-ion is the perfect solution to the problem of playing an instrument while driving a car. With 4 keys attached to each side of the steering wheel, you can select a chord base with your left hand, and the chord type with your right hand, so you can play along in complete safety, without taking your hands off the steering wheel. 

Come and enjoy the freedom of playing while driving! (and create a new activity - priving!)

 

 

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Literal Music Video in Hebrew

Participants: Dror Gill (in spirit only), Oded Sharon, Ayelet Yagil and looking for more creative spirits...

 

Literal Music Videos are a new trend in user-generated music video remakes, where the original lyrics are replaced with lyrics which describe the action in the video clip itself.  Below is an excellent example, many more on YouTube...

 

This project we will create a literal video in Heberew, based on a classic music video clip from "Od Lahit" which we will select on-site.  All we need is some audio and video editing software and a lot of alcohol!

(Dror, i'll help you write a song or two. I got some ideas. -- Oded Sharon)

 

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Text and the Geekie

Participants: Adi Pecket and You are all welcome to join me.

During GeekCon I will shoot a series of photos. each photo represnt an English letter with a string connection to GeekCon camp.

This project is based on my former project "Text and the city" which contains urban pictures representing english letters.

 

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 Runvas

Participants: Arnon Yaar, Roy Shilkrot

Use the grass as a virtual canvas. Use your feet as a virtual brash.
...And now start running.

Stop running - it won't draw.
Start walking - it won't draw.

 

oh, and you can see what you're drawing on your iPhone in real time.

 

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Cripple Run Arcade Project

Participants: Goldy, Roee Kremer, Sonya Novosolov, Shahar Zrihenn, friends.

Using a real-life wheelchair, and a simple hardware hack, we will create a working demo of a driving game, with the chair as the controller. The game design is 3 years old and includes dark humor, escaping a mental hospital and un-dead medcial staff.
The vision takes this project to be stationed in hospitals, changing the rules of "who is able".

Check out the "Needed" section, we are still looking for hardware or back-up participants.

 

 

ToS Commons

cause life's too short to be reading legalese

The first (and hopefully not the last) of the GeekCon Public Service Projects (PSP ;-) ) 

Participants: Eran Sandler

In one sentense: A community public service to overcome Terms of Service (ToS) ignorance and raise awareness of legal talk

We all sign Terms of Service (ToS) agreements when we use web services. Some of the problems with these ToS is:

• It changes whenever the ToS owner wants (there is usually a paragprah stating that they can do that whenever they want)
• It's written in legal-talk
  

So, what can we do about it?

So what ToS Commons is about?

• Tracking ToS changes around the web
• Alerting of such changes via @toscommons Twitter account as well as a changes feed
• Provide a community edited human-talk version of the ToS
• Provide a Widget that ToS owner can place side by side on their ToS page
• Provide an API to allow the consturction of a ToS commons toolbar/extension for browsers which will allow users to quickly view the ToS Commons version of the ToS in human-talk quickly as well as look at the amount of times and changes that were done to the ToS of that site.

What needs to be done?

• To make it easier to do a human version of a ToS, there is a need for a P3P like language that will generalize the major points ofa ToS in terms of user personal data entered, user generated content, etc.
• Build and open source the site (preferablly building it on Google AppEngine to have 0 cost)
• Build the crawler on top of Google AppEngine
• Get or write a text comparison engine (preferablly get) so that we can show what changed between versions
• Write the Twitter integration
• Define the API
• Design the site and widget

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Twitter Movie Quotes Recognizer

Participants: Adi Avnit

Remember some quote and can't determine which movie it is from?

Now you only need to send a tweet to @QMovie with the tag #moviequote and in a few seconds you'll receive a reply containing the name of the movie in question.

Due to Twitter throttling limitation the account is not up now, should be running as soon as I get white-listed by Twitter. 

Virtual Graffiti

Participants: Romi Itzhaki, Yariv Habot

Participants:Yariv, Achi and Shachar

Herbie the Drunk Bug

Participants: Gur Zeevi, Boaz Kantor