dykstraNet

Spent last weekend in NYC. You forget about how fantastic New York is when you have not been in a while. Lex and I had a great time road tripping down there. (Although she slept most of the way… great co-pilot). Mapquest says that it takes 4 hours. We were in the city in 3:15. Then we spent 45 minutes trying to find the right combinations of turns that would route us around the Romania Day Street Festival. (Something Google Maps did not know about) Our hotel was on Church St. directly across from ‘Ground Zero’ and between all the construction and street fair bedlam, we had a tough time finding the hotel. No wonder you have to be 18 to drive in Manhattan.

We proceeded directly to the Tisch School at NYU so that we could catch graduates presenting their Master’s Thesis’. The urban campus had a great energy to it, with purple and white banners everywhere. The school itself was in a really great high-ceilinged space with a lot of art and photography on the bricked walls. Lex and I were mesmerized by some backlit large format photographs. However some of the photos were pretty pedestrian and mundane… as my sister can attest.

Going up to the fourth floor, we entered the ITP area. The main lobby was lined by student projects one of which was quite engaging. ‘The Wooden Mirror” was a panel with hundreds of wooden tiles that tilted up and down based on input from an embedded camera. The wooden tiles would arrange themselves based on the image captured from the camera. (Lex has a photo of herself in front of the wooden mirror on her flickr site.)

The high ceilings and brick walls gave the place a real artist loft feel. We proceded to the presentation room which was totally wired for simulcast on the internet. The small room was about three quarters filled, half with open laptops tuned into the webcast of the presentation that was taking place right in front of them. Lex noted that they were chatting in real time with people watching on the net.

The first presentation we saw Limor Garcia presenting her web site cellphedia.com.

From the site:

Cellphedia is the 1st Ubiquitous Social Encyclopedia
This is a cell phone application that promotes the sharing of knowledge. It allows to send and receive encyclopedia-type inquiries between specific, pre-defined groups of users, through Text messaging. Users can register here on this site and start building the quick-reference Cellphedia-type encyclopedia entries, by asking other users and answering other users’ questions where-ever cell phone service is available.

I was really impressed. This is exactly the type of thing I would find interesting.

However, not all the presentations were as interesting as Limor’s. Some were downright unimpressive. For example one student had made flash animation for her baby to watch. It was a nice little movie, but I wouldn’t want to spend two years and 6 figures learning how to make a flash movie. Perhaps she did other interesting work, and I don’t want to cast stones… but in shopping for a place to go to school I found myself wondering what the school really had to offer.

Other projects that we saw:
Too Fast for Tracks
Losing Dogs and Losing Dog Men - An Experimental Documentary
GCard Collaborative Interactive Greeting Cards

My cousin Jason, who works in an academic environment, told me that there is normally a big range when it comes to the quality of Masters level work. He suggested that I meet the faculty and get a good feel for the facilities that would be at my disposal. Looks like it’s back to New York this fall to take part in their normal student recruitment activities.

UPDATE: dodgeball.com, a project from last year was just bought by google.

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Romania Day Festival
Broadway from Battery Place to Fulton Street
• Saturday, May 7, 2005

Millenium Hilton
55 Church Street,
New York, NY, 10007
Tel: +1-212-693-2001

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 9:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.