Jai Sawkar – Looking Outwards 12

This week, I looked at two different projects similar to what my group is working on as our Final Project. The first project is a fairly “name brand” project taken under by Snapchat, and that is Snapchat’s Filters. Snapchat filters are quite interesting. They allow users real-time augmented reality through their own smartphone, allowing them to tune their faces, create mini animations, or just simply make it look like a cute puppy. It is interesting to see that this facial recognition technology is a relatively old technology, but Snapchat was able to innovate it and revitalize it in its current market!

Moreover, there is going to be an aspect of our project that plays music. I found a project by Pierry Jaquillard at ECAL Media and Interaction Design Unit. In this project, Pierry takes a person’s DNA and turns it into music notes. As of now the project only has Pierry’s DNA. It includes all 23 chromosomes, which are run through different interfaces in order to create different results. He uses Javascript to process the notes to a visualization. Then, he uses the visuals to encode a musical file. Though this project is definitely out of our scope for the final, it is interesting what designers can make out of the smallest and least-connected items!

Link to Snapchat Article

Link to Pierry’s Piece