ProphecyBoy

Learning about prostitutes in Brooklyn in the 70's. Like you do. - more on Twitter

Voice Recognition with Lumenvox

Because of Booty Dialer work, I haven't had time to really flesh out the Echo and Narcissus project I had in mind, but I did begin playing with Lumenvox, the voice-recognition engine that we've got installed on the ITP Asterisk server. It's a pretty robust system, as long as you ...

Booty Dialer update

For our Redial midterm, we created Booty Dialer, which is an automated booty call system (some background here). The idea was to automate the oh-so-laborious process of trying to find some booty when you're out on the town. You sign up online before hand and enter in your potential booty ...

Festival, SABLE, and a different kind of Echo Test

image by David Revoy Asterisk's text-to-speech system is called Festival. By itself, Festival sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill text-to-speech system, but it does have the ability to understand SABLE, which is a markup language for rendering text as speech. (There's a good tag reference for SABLE here.) The idea is that ...

LEGO a Go-Go

How could I not post that picture? As a little experiment in getting Asterisk to interface with physical objects, I setup a servo that will push a LEGO man over when the user enters 1 on their phone and pulls him back up when they enter 2. It was all relatively ...

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The Invention of Murder play testing this weekend

Jeff designed this awesome cover for our Invention of Murder game books. Adam, Jeff, Ruth, and I are play testing our big game this weekend, and we'd love for you to join us. The Invention of Murder is a mystery game based on the real unsolved murder of Mary Rogers in ...

The Invention of Murder – location plotting and IA

For Big Games, Adam Parrish, Ruth, Jeff, and I are creating a mystery game played in the streets of lower Manhattan (see above!), based on the unsolved murder of Mary Rogers, made famous in Edgar Allen Poe's story The Mystery of Marie Roget. We borrowed some gameplay mechanics from the ...

Booty Dialer IA

For our Redial midterm, Corrine and Marc and I are creating Booty Dialer, an automated booty call system. The notion is that you sign up on the website, and enter the phone numbers of your potential booty calls. When you're out and about and decide you want some booty, you ...

The Performativity of Expectation

[QUICKTIME http://www.prophecyboy.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/performingtech/WSP.mp4 430 345 false true] Last week, Scott and Daniel and I came up with a grand scheme to help launch a long-term project we've been working on. The idea was to get a bunch of people in Washington Square Park at the same time and cause them to all ...

AGI scripting and call files

We've started working with AGI scripting, which allows you to interface with Asterisk from an external file. And we've got the handy phpAGI library installed, so we can perform most Asterisk functions from a PHP script, plus have access to MySQL and all the advanced functions of PHP, which certainly ...

Colophon

Turning coffee into feats of intellectual derring-do since 2001

Hi there, I'm Adam Simon. I'm the Creative Director and Co-Founder of Socialbomb, a social gaming startup in New York City. I recently graduated from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), doing research in large scale game design, social networking, urban computing, performative technology, and networked objects. You can find info on my thesis here, and a big list of all my ITP-related posts here

I sometimes work at area/code.

Projects that I've been a part of which you might have heard of include BootyDialer, The Invention of Murder, Rumplestiltskin (An Aretefactual Performance), & Sharkrunners

You can email me at adam @ [the name of this website].

Syndicate

Social Heroes: Games as APIs for Social Interaction (aka, my ITP thesis)

Because I've been busy/lazy and off the blogging habit, here, at long last, is my thesis for ITP, almost a year late. Comments and such are still more than welcome, as many of the ideas are still being worked on in my current projects, and Social Heroes itself is likely ...

Crazy Blind Date: A Quintet for Human & Computer

The appeal of Crazy Blind Date\ is immediately apparent, and seems custom-designed for busy city folks: “on very short notice we can set you up on quick dates with total strangers at public places like bars and coffee shops. You're not allowed to see their picture or even communicate.” Created ...
March 29th 2008
Tags: Social Software Studio, Thesis 2 Comments

Social Heroes

My thesis has split into two ideas, something which was foreshadowed at the end of my midterm presentation. I mistakenly assumed that one of the ideas would seem obviously better than the other, but that hasn't happened. Rather, I'm stuck with two ideas which I think explore the ideas I'm ...
March 16th 2008
Tags: ITP One Comment

PCBs from Eagle to Production

In this post I'm going to explain how to output files from Eagle PCB in order to send your designs off to be professionally fabbed. There are two major steps before this in the process: creating the electrical schematic, and moving from that schematic to a board layout. I'm not ...
March 14th 2008
Tags: Social Software Studio, Thesis One Comment

Thesis: midterm presentation & playtest

| View | Upload your own ITP Thesis: Midterm presentation (with notes) (PDF) Here's the midterm presentation I just gave in my thesis section (the PDF includes the presenter notes, and is perhaps more comprehensible). I felt like this presentation was a return to form for me - lots of photos, ...

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