One Seat Away project at the Sonar music festival or the sofa connected to the Internet
At 2013 I also met a lot of interesting people in Munich. For serendipity I met Simone Rebaudengo who was one of the creators of the Toasters connected to the Internet through his Addictive products' thesis. We met a lot of times to think about new projects for connecting objects to the Internet.
Sònar asked us if we would be able to connect something to the Internet for the music festival. With Simone Rebaudengo, Ken Frederick, Daniel Kluge and me we made a very interesting brainstorming and iterations. Our first thought was that it could be very interesting to connect the music of the festival to remote devices, so from far away you would be able to feel the music (not hear it). We wanted to convert music into a physical thing and move it around the world through Internet connected objects.
After some iterations we realized that most of the Sonar by day attendants were Barcelona tourists, so our first idea was to have objects around Barcelona where the citizens that were not at the music festival would be able to enjoy the music "feeling" what was happening in real-time at the festival. On the other hand, at the festival we would have some sofas and chairs where the festival attendants would be able to feel what was happening at the city in real-time (tweets, buses proximity from the venue, car traffic status, instagram pictures, Bicing status, weather and temperature) through physical shakings.
So we built it! We built a sofa connected to the Internet that was able to vibrate with some servos at the beat of the music of the Sònar Village. Daniel built an amazing music analyzer that was converting the real-time music into numbers, pushing that information to theThings.IO cloud server. I made the infrastructure to store real-time music-numbers and pull them through Arduinos to the sofa. Simone built the sofa motors and the connections with the Arduino. Ken made a gorgeous visualization of the real-time status of Barcelona (tweets, bus movements, traffic status, bicing, weather among other) and even helped on all the other processes.
Finally, Simone and I were at the Sònar 3 days exposing the sofa connected to the Internet and 4 puffs connected to the city. We couldn't move the sofa around the city as we wanted but anyway the experience was great. Hundreds of people sat down in our sofas to experience what was happening at the Sònar festival and at the city in real-time and everyone congratuladed us!
Let's continue connecting objects to the Internet!
If you have any comment, don't hesitate to contact me :)
Links
Back to Marc Pous