She’s cute, she sings, but she’s not real. Instead, her voice is your instrument and you’re the composer/lyricist and through Hatsune Miku, you’re living through song too. Want to add vibrato? Change the pitch or warmth of the voice? You can here. Voice simulation taken on to another level. Her creator’s songs get replayed, resampled, and reborn into endless remixes, music videos, and parodies on Nico Nico and YouTube. She even had a real concert staged in Tokyo. Fujita Saki is the original voice of Hatsune Miku providing the foundation of the computer program that composers use. Hatsune Miku is the most recognized Vocaloid singer but there have been spinoffs. It brings up some interesting issues as Japanese singers have refused to contribute to Vocaloid software, saying they were afraid their careers would be endangered. Instead, the computer programmers behind Vocaloid dipped into Japan’s voice actor community to find talent. Aside from Fujita Saki, the other voices contributing to the different Vocaloid avatars can be tightly secretive – even more interesting, they sign the rights to their voices to be used in the programs. Would it be weird to hear variations of yourself singing unknown songs on the ‘Net?

Get a sampling of the different songs that people have created with Vocaloid: Hatsune Miku below.

This video is really striking because if I heard this playing on someone’s stereo, I WOUDLN’T be able to tell this was not a real person singing this AT ALL.

A very succinct and convincing way to quickly show people how your app works and what makes it so appealing (aside from the interesting UI/UX) to get them on board. I don’t have an iPad but gosh darnit, this isn’t helping me in the “gimme gimme” department of my brain.

via every.jelly.bean

As part of Team FarmBridge, I’m handling the web development and design as we gear up for the Microsoft Design Expo this mid-July in Redmond, Wa. Here’s a snapshot of FarmBridge.org. I’d like to give a shout-out to CSSEdit and Niall Doherty’s Coda Slider for being awesome. It’s the first time, I’ve really hand-coded a web design as thoroughly as I have (now I’ve done SocialDrinkster, StreetSnaps, etc but this was on a different level) on a front-end level.

The written content will be updated as we draw closer to showtime but if anyone’s curious to poke around, feel free. Just realize it’s under construction, sssssh.  Also, as a social media ninja, I’ve started up FarmBridge on Twitter and it now has its own Facebook Fan Page. Join us there too!

Chris O’Shea’s Audience installation with rAndom International for the Deloitte Ignite Festival at the Royal Opera House.

Personification of inanimate objects take an eerie, surreal turn with Chris O’Shea’s Audience Installation. Made up of 64 mirrors, the reflective installation reacts to a human presence by following their movements and displaying humanistic quirks. By using a multitude of mirrors that reflect back on the audience member, you have to ask yourself, who’s watching who?

I’ll let the artist explain: “When members of the audience occupy the space, the mirrors inquisitively follow someone that they find interesting. Having chosen their subject, they all synchronise and turn their heads towards them. Suddenly that person can see their reflection in all of the mirrors. They will watch this person until they become disinterested, then either seek out another subject or return to their private chatter. The collective behaviour of the objects is beyond the control of the viewer, as it is left entirely to their discretion to let go of their subject.”

Brian Jones and I were interviewed about SocialDrinkster by Matt Danzico, a BBC multimedia journalist who was touring the ITP Spring Show. Check out the audio slideshow, we appear around 2:49M among the other student projects featured. It’s our first press mention! So excited and feeling fortunate that I have this opportunity to showcase our mobile app to a broader audience outside of school.  Our website is linked on the bottom of the web page. Click below to see and listen.

BBC Audio Slideshow: Technology and art fuse in NYC

Listen to hear more about where I study at NYU ITP.

SocialDrinkster will be debuting tomorrow! What is SocialDrinkster? So glad you asked!
“SocialDrinkster is about free alerts for free things. Pass freebies to your friends. On The Go,On Your Phone.”

People like free things. People like to be social.
Businesses can attract flocks of people to test products or fill the room up.
As a mobile app, you get alerts on-the-go. You can check your email, surf the news, and still get a SocialDrinkster alert clueing you in to a bar’s free drink offer, restaurant’s free tapas offer, etc.”
A friendly mobile app developed by Cindy Wong + Brian E Jones in New York City at NYU ITP.

See Brian E  Jones and I at the NYU ITP Spring Show 2010!

Sunday, May 9, 2-6pm & Monday, May 10, 5-9pm
ITP @ 721 Broadway, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10003

FarmBridge: Building Communities Around Local Food

We won the Design Expo 2010 challenge for NYU! Here’s my long-due documentation about my 12-week coursework for ITP’s Design Expo course, taught by Prof. Nancy Herchinger.

What is Design Expo?

“Microsoft is providing a forum around the theme “Service meets Social” to showcase exceptional design process and ideas.  As part of a semester long course, students are asked to form interdisciplinary teams of 2-4 students to design a user experience prototype .Students will research a design problem which is related to the theme this year, define a scenario, ideate design solutions, select one idea to prototype, and study the impact on real users.”

Team’s Response to “Service meets Social”

FarmBridge: Building Communities Around Local Food. As a team, we came to the realization that as New Yorkers, we are passionate about food and our local neighborhoods.  However, New York City is a city of extreme income disparity  where  entire communities do not have access to the kind of fresh, healthy that we care so much about. Our solution became FarmBridge.  We want to create an online platform that makes it easier for neighbors to form groups and gain access to locally farmed food.

Local Food Movement: What’s Our Cause?

For a user audience, we decided to focus on community supported agriculture groups (CSAs). These are local neighborhood communities that band together to buy directly from area farmers. So, why CSAs? Why not farmers’ markets, mail-order, or whatnot? See below:

1) Grassroots approach to the problems that the local food movement aims to address.

2)Our research points to at tremendous demand from within community.

3) Model most able to get good food to people who live beyond just the wealthier neighborhoods in the city.

User Needs + User Research:

These communities are facing demand that is quickly outpacing their logistical/administrative capabilities. Each community handles their own administrative/logistical setup in different ways (pen/paper, Excel, Google Docs, email, Ning, etc) and are dependent on volunteer core managers who deal with membership setup, farmers, budgeting, etc. They all go through the same iterative processes but resources are rarely shared (that is starting to change but is happening slowly on an ad-hoc basis).  These methods may be fine for a small-scale setup but what happens when demand skyrockets? How do you let success not lead to your community’s failure? Ex: You had 50 people in your membership but the following year, you have 200, 300 people showing up at your neighborhood pickup spot?  How do you make sure that your community group can handle volunteer changes, vendor changes, etc. without disrupting your membership? How do you offer the same close-knit, social community feel that CSAs inspire within an online space but w/o that sterile, anonymous feel?

We attended a New York City conference for local food organizers and communities, spoke to over a dozen organizers, volunteer coordinators, and members. After listening to this specific community, we figured out our audience and how we could provide a service to them.

User Audience:

We are going to provide CSA managers with the tools they need to run these communities. Furthermore, for members, we want to emulate the same neighborhood feel that these communities inspire in real life by offering a social space for them online.

Design Prototypes

With our presentation – we delivered a clean vision of what we wanted. We wanted to offer easy, friendly way for these communities to self-organize and manage themselves. We also wanted a warm, inviting design for which members felt compelled to share content and communicate each other online in valuable ways. We hope that with our designed platform we can help this movement grow. For further documentation, please visit teammate, Julio Terra and his excellent documentation.

Now what?

From each school, a representative team from each school (ahem, us!) will be featured in a presentation at the 2010 Microsoft Faculty Summit July 12-13, 2010 in Redmond, Washington. “The Design Expo creates a forum for encouraging “out of the box” thinking, by exploring students’ visions for the future of computing as well as honing their presentation skills.”

“If you’re gonna cry, you better code and cry.”

– Cindy Wong