Except form being a coach at the Picnic08 Mediamatic social RFID hackerscamp, I and a couple of others made the vBird.

vBird is a social bird which likes to fly, but cannot; it needs people to help it fly. The vBird project wished to build upon the successful by poly-xelor. The vBird’s heart has two parts: a camera with a wireless transmitter and a bluetooth Arduino with a serial RFID reader, a Lilypad accelerometer, and some leds. The former streams the flight to the vBird’s nest, the latter is used to identify the thrower and receiver of the vBird (by the RFID reader and the tags of the throwers). The accelerometer detects if the vBird is being thrown, flying, or being catched; an appropriate sound is then send out through the speakers in the nest (’nice to meet you’, ‘wheeeeee’). The leds are used as the eyes.

Because we knew who threw the bird (because of the embedded RFID reader), we could upload the video fragments captured by the vBird to the appropirate profiles in the picnic network. The idea was powerful and the technique worked as a prototype. However, throwing hardware needs solid casing and a lot of stuff broke during the proces. It would have been better also to use a hi-speed camera as our current camera did not have a high enough sample rate to provide really cool videos. A couple of shots were quite nice though, of which you can find some here: with the flash interface or as a playlist of movies.

All in all it was a fun project, and we had a good team. As a prototype it worked quite well, to be fool proof it would need some tweaks. If you want to know more about the vBird, check out our page at Mediamatic. All the code for the vBird can be found here. And of course, the other teams made really nice projects too, like a physical mario cart, a google elevator contest, the ik-Run, breeders, a mobile massage couch, and more

BTW, last year @ mediamatic’s hackerscamp I made iTea, an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. In the coffee cup on top of the table, you can place your rfid tag - which is given to you at the entrance of the conference and linked to a social network - and the table will start to display information about you - like an oracle.