I’ve been working on my midterm, but it is not fully functional version as of yet. It’s a complex undertaking.
I changed my initial idea to something which I found more compelling and interesting. The project is called Bickr PhotoFrame, which is a physical photo frame with an LCD panel and mini ITX linux machine built behind it. People can post pictures to the Bickr PhotoFrame via their cellphone and web by sending pictures to an email account (photo@santram.net). The photos get scraped from the email account using Shawn’s photo grabber perl script into a designated folder on my web server(http://www.santram.net/photo). The Bickr PhotoFrame will periodically grab images from the image folder and copy them wirelessly to it’s own hard drive. From an end-user perspective, people can not only view the photos on the screen, but they can comment and vote on the pictures. I’m taking Social Software, Designing Digital Products, Materials, and Embedding Privacy this semester and I wanted to incorporate a bit from each class with what I’m learning in Cellphonia to build this physical device & application.
In Social Software, my group is building layers onto Flickr to push group dynamics through photo sharing, commenting, and voting games. Games will include competitions like Word of the Day, where participants will send in photos that best exemplify the word of the day. So in essence, the project will allow people to compete with others in both shared and remote physical spaces by uploading photos to the PhotoFrame, adding tags, comments, and votes all via their cellphone.