First of all, I want to speak about our visits to the American Museum of Natural History and the other visit to the Second story. I will start with the AMNH trip first.
AMNH trip
As we arrived to the museum and I saw the two giant dinosaurs at the main entrance of the museum, I was thinking to myself, “This is going to be a fun trip”. I never seen such a structure before and it really did astonish me. I took a lot of photos of the two dinosaurs and tried coming close enough to them to see if the bones they were made of were actually real dinosaur bones. I do not really know if the bones were real but they looked pretty real to me.
We only walked around a small portion of the museum but I actually learnt a lot of new stuff especially in the microbiome part of the museum. The touch screen with the video of the girl was very cool and I wonder how much effort it would actually take a person to build something like this. It was very informative too along with it being interactively great.
The final part of the trip was the most interesting and exciting part. The Planetarium. I remember that I went to a very similar planetarium when I was a child in a place called “The scientific center” in Kuwait but it was not as large as the one in AMNH. It was also about galaxies and the universe but I really loved the one AMNH. The design of the large screen and the quality and resolution of it is incredible. Also, the sound quality was very good and of course the content of the short film was very informative. I think making the planetarium show more interactive would be a hard task as I could imagine. I think the screen would not rather be on the sides of the room rather than the ceiling so that people can actually touch it and some ind of effects can happen but this idea would not make the planetarium show as beautiful in my opinion. The fact that the film was about space and that the audience had to look up in the ceiling made it much more eye appealing and realistic.
It was a very informative and incredible visit for sure.
Second story trip
First of I want to start by saying the that the guys we met at the Second story lab were very cool and seem to be very good at what they do. When we arrived at the lab and saw the prototypes they made and kept in the lab, I remembered the engineering course “Design and Innovation” that I took last J-term. One of the main differences between the course we took in Abu Dhabi and the Second story team that is present in the working procedure and the prototyping process and coming up with the final project is making the project for a client. I wonder how much pressure do they go through the press of making these projects especially if they have a limited time to complete it. When they told us that they only had 2 weeks for some of the projects they undertook, I was surprised that they actually were able to finish these projects on time.
I believe the amount of pressure, work and fun they are having along the way when working on a project is extraordinary. I really liked the project with the lights changing as the user(s) move the butterfly shaped objects. It seems very interesting to learn more about it and how they actually implemented it. To be honest, if I had the time to apply for an internship in their lab I would do it. But of course because I am an Engineering major, I have no time to do much but hopefully at some point (maybe in the summer) I can apply for an internship either in their lab or a similar lab in New York.
Assignment 5
This assignment was pretty cool. I saw some examples from the github website and decided to make a program that takes input from the user to do some certain effect. I chose this specific task because I have already used images and sounds in my previous homework so I decided to create something that I just learnt.
The code is pretty simple to understand and easy to implement. I started with creating a ball object of random size and color. Then I created a variable called input and another variable called vol. I used the input variable inside the setup function for me to then use the AudioIn() function which looks for sound input. I used the vol variable outside the setup function to use it for getting the value or level of the sound of the user.
The rest of the code is straightforward. If the volume of the sound the user has created surpassed 0.2, balls will be created on the screen. Also, I used the volume or level of the sound coming from the microphone to change the radius of the balls created from the sound. The colors of the ball were randomly assigned too.
I am happy about the course so far. I learnt a lot of stuff from the trips and from professor Shiffman as I think he is doing a great job making this course move forward and teaching new stuff all the time in such a very compressed semester. I am really looking forward to the few remaining seminars and the final project!!!