About a month and a half ago i was approached by SuperUber – a Brazilian based interactive design collective – to remake one of their most exciting and successful pieces: SuperPong. The installation consists of a game that mixes elements from foosball and Pong. Up to eight participants can play by walking up to the [...]

In January 2011 I spent new years in Bahia and was introduced to Carlinhos Brown by a close friend. Knowing that Brown is one of the most talented percussionists and musician we have in Brazil, we talked about creating a full body suit with ten sensors, which were activated each time they were hit, acting [...]

Atomos from Lucas Werthein on Vimeo.
Atomos was an installation developed as a final project for Zach Lieberman’s, Algorithmic Animation class. I used a vector field, perlin noise field, particle systems, and computer vision algorithms to create a game dynamic. Particles would appear on the screen and the player would have to put them into small [...]

www.theboomshakalaka.com

Lucas Werthein & Jason Aston – Boom Shakalaka @ IAC from Lucas Werthein on Vimeo.
As Rube Goldberg showed us in his now notorious cartoons depicting complex devices performing the simplest of tasks in the most roundabout ways, precision, timing, and creativity are tantamount to making such a machine functional and enjoyable. Invoking a popular physics [...]

Comfort Station from Lucas Werthein on Vimeo.
Comfort Station is a video installation developed at ITP. It uses Arduino, Infrared Sensors, and MaxMSP/ Jitter. The installation is about water waste. It portrays how we waste water unnoticeably and makes a correlation with people flushing without perception as they walk by an LCD screen.

For this project i hooked up two flex sensors, one force sensor and one infrared sensor to an Arduino. The values outputed by sensors are going into Max/MSP and max is sending bangs to Garage Band. In garage band i selected a synthesizer. Therefore, every-time i trigger a sensor, i would get a different note [...]

This installation was developed at the Interactive Telecommunications Programe at NYU. The installation consists of a cascade water system that recycles its own water. There is an interactive projection on the waterfall, which was developed in MAX MSP/ Jitter. When you come close to the projection, the sea creatures react to the person’s presence.

Waterfall Installation [...]

For our physical computing class, we built a juke box using arduino and an MP3 chip. The juke box worked as a time traveling machine, since you could choose from a variety of years, geographic region, politics, culture, and music to listen to and browse.

Juke Box from Lucas Werthein on Vimeo.

Android Golem from Lucas Werthein on Vimeo.
www.androidgole.com
When we first started to work on this project, we were intrigued by the fact that a hand held mobile device would control a robot. We’ve been interested in physical computing and Arduino since the day we arrived at ITP. Therefore, it made sense to develop a project that [...]

This was our final project for our Physical Computing class. We had 5 buckets with piezo sensors, hooked up to an Arduino which controlled pixels on the screen. Depending on which drum you would hit, different pixels would be revealed on the screen. Therefore, the faster you play, the more pixels you would reveal. The [...]