[SPOTs AT THE ZeroOne FESTIVAL] Spot the SPOTs The ZeroOne ISEA Festival in San Jose begins Monday, August 7 and runs through August 13. Our Sun Labs Artist in Residence, Ashok Sukumaran, and the Sun SPOTs team have been working very hard on his installation. Park View Hotel will be located on Plaza de Caesar Chavez, across the street from the Fairmont Hotel. More than 150 artists works and performances will be showcased during the largest new media art festival in North America, including the team of artists presenting Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight - a multi-site artwork created for the Festival (link and link). Pioneers will be located in the ISEA South Hall Conference Center (big tent south of the SJ Convention Hall). More information about the show can be accessed at the following sites:
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SPOTS AT SAN MATEO MAKER FAIRE] April 22 & 23 Our friends over at Make Magazine a throwing a bit of a party at the San Mateo County Fair Grounds April 22 & 23, 2006 called the Maker Faire. We wouldn't want to miss a party, so we will be there showing off Sun SPOTs as well as checking out all the other cool exhibits. If you are in the San Francisco Bay area, you should attend this event and drop by our booth to say hello. See a Sun SPOT in person and find out what we've been doing with them in our copious (not!) spare time. It should be a lot of fun! |
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[ECOLOGY] The New Ecology of Things In the 2005 Fall Quarter at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, the faculty taught a class called the New Ecology of Things. This design class was unusual because instead of models, the student designers built and demonstrated working prototypes of their ideas, using Sun SPOTs as the development platform in an exploration of the trends and futures of small electronic devices. Each student team researched specific audiences and contexts, then developed systems that addressed the questions of how people and things might interact in a fluid environment of data-rich things. The results were quite impressive, ranging from flocking blimps and smart shoes to new musical instruments and match-making environments. |
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[ROCKET LAUNCH] Sun Labs Space Program At Sun Microsystems Laboratories, we occasionally do what we call Friday Projects. The goal of these projects is to do something from start to finish in a single day. For this particular Friday project, we decided to launch Sun SPOTs on a model rocket. So starting Friday morning, we built a rocket, embedded 2 Sun SPOTs in "Space Shuttle" vehicles, wrote the ground-telemetry software (in Java), developed some Sun SPOT antenna extenders and documented the whole thing from start to finish. The result? We launched two (redundant) Sun SPOTs on a single rocket that streamed light, temperature and acceleration data live over the radio to the ground stations that were busy plotting the data. |
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[ARTIST IN RESIDENCE] Sun Labs Artist in Residence Renowned media artist Ashok Sukumaran is the first artist-in-residence at Sun Labs. His charter is to develop a work of art for display at the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) Symposium, to be held August 5-13, 2006, in downtown San Jose. His plan is to develop a work he imagines as a "line-of-sight network" distributed across an entire city block - work that the general public can interact with and that incorporates Project Sun SPOT Technology. Mr. Sukumaran is still in the early conceptual stages of creating his artwork for the ISEA exhibit, but the scale will be large and the work will be interactive. He is currently experimenting with various ways to enable participants to point a hand-held infra-red device at the environment and illuminate or even turn on wireless sensors that are within the viewer's line of sight and within range. "A game of spot the SPOTs," he said. "We could create a mesh of these devices, which remain hidden until they are propagated by the viewer." |