Names: Peter Ascoli Yun Jung Jenna Lee Wojciech Syta

Mentors Ganesh Ramanathan and Rafale Chang at The Tiger Party

Statement:

Every spring, The Cooper Union hosts its End of Year Show (EOYS) to showcase projects from each of its three schools, Art, Architecture and Engineering. However, the event is confined to a small space on campus and is not well known throughout New York City. Our intentions are to draw attention to the school and its EOYS show by creating truly exceptional and ambitious project that will be appreciated by the public, not just the Cooper community.

We explored the idea of attaching infrared LEDs, which are invisible to the naked eye but can be detected by digital camera sensors, to the perforated mesh of 41 Cooper Square to display a unique and interactive design. To engage users, even those outside of the immediate Cooper community, Microsoft Kinects were to be placed along the sidewalk directly below the main facade. The Kinects would capture the shapes of people walking by and display them on the side of the building. This platform would allow for tourists, Cooper Union students and faculty, as well as the everyday New Yorker to virtually interact with the New Academic Building.

Aspects of the project included developing an attachment system for the LEDs, the design to be displayed, programming Kinects to generate a video output of the shapes of people and programming an Arduino to turn on the LEDs, determining the proper resolution by methods of analyzing infrared light intensity in Photoshop and AutoCAD, and writing a project proposal.

Unfortunately, budget estimations yielded values that The Cooper Union would never consider funding, thus halting the development of method of attaching individual LEDs to the New Academic Building's skin.

What you see on display here at the EOYS is a small prototype demonstrating the potential of the original idea. Please pull out your camera and enjoy!

For more information on the project please visit: dap.cooper.edu > Principles of Design > IR Water Mark

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