Yaminie Patodia

My Food Valentine

// March 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Collective Storytelling

My Food Valentine is a platform where people share their love for food. It’s a place where people write love letters to their favorite food. And Food items compete to be on our ‘Most Loved’ list based on the number of lovers they accumulate.

This is my thesis project and the website is under development. I am using the drupal CMS to build the site.

Plott.me

// December 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // Dynamic Web, Location

Plott.me is a location based platform for telling stories.

It used the Google Street View API to embed audio tagged with location. As you navigate through the Street View interface, audio files play based on your location on the map. The audio piece delivers the narrative while also guiding you through the map.

The experience becomes more engaging in a Street View interface as we were able to control what the user sees at any particular time in the audio. So the user is able to view the an object in the right context. It simulates the experience of a real guided tour. We took an existing Time Square audio tour to demonstrate our concept.

I worked with Thomas Chan, Mitch Said and Kristin O’Friel in the project. The project was showcased during ITP Winter Show ‘09

Project url: http://plott.me

Social Life

// April 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Alternate Reality Games

Social Life is an interactive narrative experience that unfolds in a fictional world online, with elements of pervasive gaming and alternate reality game mechanics. Throughout the semester, as we studied the body of public ARG content, it became apparent that most of the stories were being crafted around the same content, for the same demographic.

Given the social aspect of the medium, and the pervasive elements it taps (facebook pages, blogs, etc) it seemed like a younger, more casual audience would be an interesting audience to target.

As a result, we created Social Life, a mystery surrounding a group of friends that users are asked to infiltrate, and help figure out the unfolding drama through a series of intricately woven narrative puzzles including hacking into (fictional characters’) email accounts, matching data from calendars to credit card bills to see who is telling the truth, and deciphering information from photographs.

The “rabbit hole” and narrative hub of the game is http://www.sociallifeny.blogspot.com, the blog belonging to (the fictional character) Melissa Havergal. Melissa blogs about NY social events, her friends, and her upcoming wedding, and readers share in her devastation to find out she has been betrayed by her closest confidantes. However, the blog is only part of the story. As readers get more involved and start digging around they uncover the full story.

Another aspect we want to play with was trying to make the puzzles as diagetic as possible, unlike some ARGs which tend to follow a format of ‘Solve the puzzle, get a piece of the story’. The puzzles or nodes in Social Life were more woven into the storyline – Like figuring out email passwords and Flickr photo tags to get more content.

Fellow Game Masters: Ramona Pringle, Jonathan Swerdloff and Josh Satbai

Project url: http://www.sociallifeny.blogspot.com

Bandits!

// April 5th, 2008 // No Comments » // Collective Storytelling

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Bandit is an Oral Storytelling project where I endeavored to bring my mother’s stories to a wider section of people.

In this project, my mother, who is a non-native speaker of English, attempts to tell her story in the language adding her own local flavor to it. I’ve used simple illustrations to assist her story and match her simple style

Resembuild

// March 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Alternate Reality Games, Communication Lab, Dynamic Web, Introduction to Computational Media, Location, Mobile Media, Physical Computing

Resembuild is a mobile phone photo collage powered by human intelligence.

The project asks users to reconstruct an image from a series of abstract fragments, using their mobile phone camera. The image pieces are printed on numbered cards (and made available via a custom phone application), and participants are required to take a picture that resembles the one they are given, and submit it via multimedia message (MMS) to a designated e-mail address. They can either find or (re)construct the image from the world around them, and are encouraged to be as accurate (and inventive) as possible.

The final resulting collage – recreating a popular video game character – is showcased online.

It was interesting to see the elements used by the Resembuilders to recreate the image.

For this project I collaborated with Mitch Said.

Project url: http://mitchsaid.com/resembuild

Mo’body

// February 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Mobile Media

Go to Mobody

Mobody is a collaborative mobile photo body.

Participants photograph one of three body parts (head, torso or legs) using their phone camera and MMS their photo to our database (or upload it using the mobile web), and it becomes part of our body image display. Each time a new body part is sent as an MMS, it replaces the one on display

Mitch Said and I worked together for this project. It was showcased during the ITP Spring ‘08 and then selected to live as a gallery exibit on the ITP floor for Fall 09.

Project url: http://moourl.com/mobody

Robolamp

// December 29th, 2007 // No Comments » // Physical Computing

Robolamp is an intelligent source of light that responds to simple hand gestures – you can wave your hand in the direction you want light and watch the lamp follow you
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I worked with Mooshir Vahanvati on this project. Our project was showcased during the ITP Winter Show ‘07. And then continued to be part of the Gallery exhibit on the ITP floor for Spring ‘08.

Kaleidoscope

// December 29th, 2007 // No Comments » // Introduction to Computational Media

This project uses processing to create a kaleidoscopic image from a live camera feed.

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Google Direkt

Missing You

// December 5th, 2007 // No Comments » // Communication Lab

‘Missing You’ is Flash visualization for the composition of the same title by musician Ananda Shankar. I find his music deeply inspiring. It puts me to peace as well as makes me anxious.

In this animation – I’ve tried to imagine the meaning of life – starting with creation and individual expression, but ultimately coalescing into one big ‘whole’.

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