SOUNDSTAR: SOUND REACTIVE LED LAMPS [WARNING, FLASHY LIGHT]
WIRE PLOTTED PLANAR SPEAKER
HOW TO MAKE ALMOST ANYTHING
IRONMAN MK3 3D PRINTED MASK
WONDER WOMAN-INSPIRED BRACELETS
LOW-TECH IRONMAN ARC
About Elena
I am a technical entrepreneur who loves to play and build cool tech that might make an impact in the world. I was a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab's Responsive Environments Group lead by Professor Joe Paradiso.
While there, I worked on context-aware systems and novel interfaces using augmented reality. Specifically, I explored ways to better integrate extended intelligence into our daily life to create memorable experiences and interactions with our augmented reality AI assistant.
This low-tech Ironman arc was made with parts bought at the hardware store. Some of the materials are: copper wire, foams, cardboard, hot glue, round mold from packaging, white leds, chicken net, and some plumbing parts. No microcontrolelr was used in this project. The blickering was created by having a loose connection to the power source (coin cell).
Wonder Woman-Inspired Bracelets
This Wonder Woman-inspired bracelet is a low-tech project using tissue paper for casting the bracelets. Adhesive copper tapes were used to solder the simple circuit together. On one bracelet, I used a few green SMD led, coin cell battery, and a reed switch. On the other one, I embedded a small magnet in it in order to activate the reed switch and close the circuit. When the circuit is closed, the LEDs light up.
IRONMAN MK3 3D PRINTED MASK
In my Spanish YouTube channel (Tinkerall), I documented what I did in detail. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and could not add the electronics. I had to fly to the USA and start grad school. Tried to bring it with me in the luggage, but it couldnt fit safely. Will have to start over in the US if I decide to make another one.
HOW TO MAKE ALMOST ANYTHING
In the fall of 2018, I took a class called "How To Make Almost Anything" taught by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld. Every week, we had to learn, make, document, and showcase our projects. You can check out my course website
WIRE PLOTTED PLANAR SPEAKER
In the fall of 2018, I took a class called "How To Make Almost Anything" taught by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld. One of the coolest project we worked on was wire plotting a planar speaker. Sam Calish, the TA and instructor for this project, hacked the plotter machine and designed a spindler for plotting copper wire. Zijun Wei, Victoria Shen and I helped him assemble and solder everything together. You can check out this project documentation and the resulting videos on my course website. Sam has since improved the version. He documented his work on his wikipage.
SOUNDSTAR: SOUND REACTIVE LED LAMPS
During my How To Make Almost Anything class, I built a pair of sound reactive LED lamps. I documented my design and circuit diagram on my Youtube channel (in Spanish) and on my course website.
SMART MIRROR
During my How To Make Almost Anything class, I also built a smart mirror, an open source project. I documented this project in detail on my course website.
PRESENT XR
Present XR is a functional mock-up of what the future of spatial temporal VR presentation could look like. We built the platform using a VR headset and Leap Motion sensor for hand tracking. Check out our submission HERE
Teammates: Aaron Briones, Aaron Moffatt, Lewis Gardner, and Bob Levy. This was my first AR/VR/XR Hackathon. I teamed up with complete strangers with almost non-existential skill in AR/VR prototyping. This team of strangers taught me so much about Unity development and teamwork. We managed to pull a project together in less than 36 hours and won the Best in Productivity Prize! One of the best experience I have had and was able to make new friendships.
PROJECT NORTH STAR
Project North Star is an open-source AR headset project. It uses a leap motion for hand tracking and LED displays and lenses for AR projection. You can learn more about it on their Discord, blogs and get the parts HERE. When I made it, they only had the lenses (old version) for sell, so I had to 3D print the plastics and get everything else from Amazon.
HOLOLENS + NAVMESH AGENT WITH VOICE ACTIVATION
Read more about this project in my SciFab class Final Project submission. I have also documented my entire learning process and results on my github repository.
AR TOUR GUIDE NAVIGATION AND VOICE RECOGNITION MOBILE APP
This project is part of my Masters thesis work at the MIT Media Lab. I build an avatar tour guide that has an understanding of the physical environment and can navigate around it in tri-dimension. It can also understand voice commands and navigate to specific destination point. Check out my thesis
R.E.I.N.A. : towards pervasive interface agents that transcend the physical-digital worlds, by Elena Chong Loo Kodama
LightCloud: Future of Dynamic Lighting in the Shared Space
Lighting conditions in an indoor environment have been shown to affect our cognition and behaviors in a variety of ways. On average, we spend 90% of our time in indoor environments. These usually involve multiple people with diverse environmental needs sharing a space with the same lighting conditions. Additionally, besides providing us with better illumination for practical and aesthetic effects, the way we use and interact with light has not changed. To address this, we present LightCloud, a lighting system that enables each user to create and control their own dynamic light source in a shared enclosed space for enhancing social interactions and work experience. The advances in smart lighting and novel distributed system architecture will further enable novel multi-user dynamic lighting. This paper aims to provide a look into the applications of dynamic lighting between multiple users in a shared environment. This paper was published and presented at the 2020 Future Technologies Conference. You can access the paper in the proceedings:
Kodama, Elena C., Nan Zhao, and Joseph A. Paradiso. "LightCloud: Future of Dynamic Lighting in the Shared Space." Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference. Springer, Cham, 2020. here
