Personal Breeze was made by Alon Kadury, Eyal Gruss, Omri Shacham and Adi Grossman in GeekCon 2008. The purpose of all GeekCon projects is a non-practical project, that will be fun to do.
The
problem:
On a hot day, when you return home and start the air
condition or a fan, you want to stand in front of it and cool down.
However most of the times you find yourself moving around the room
doing other things. Personal breeze project tries to solve the conflict between staying in front of the fan or moving around.
Solution:
We've placed a webcam on a fan. Skin detection
algorithms written in Matlab identified your position relative to the
camera. Accordingly commands are send from the Matlab program to a WCF service, which host an NXT brick that controls a servo motor. The motor turns the fan so that you will be placed in the center
of the fan all the time.
GeekCon 2009 - DeBurger
DeBurger was made by Alon Kadury and Elad Shapira in GeekCon 2009. The purpose of all GeekCon projects is a non-practical project, that will be fun to do.
The
problem: It is a known fact that being in shape
increases productivity. Programmers often work long hours, being
stationary and operating only fingers and mouth muscles (eating). As a result programmers are likely to be out of shape. This causes
companies to face a dilemma, should I send my programmers to the gym to
improve their health (thus increasing productivity), but lose precious
work time?
Solution:
DeBurger tries to come up
with a solution in which the programming process will be more physical. If we cause the programming process to be more physical, developers will get into shape without leaving the keyboard. This
is done by creating an interface between a Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) and Microsoft Visual
Studio. This interface allows developers to operate some of the Visual Studio functionality by stepping, jumping and moving on the DDR.
The name DeBurger means eliminating the Burger effect :)
DeBurger presentation at Geekcon
GeekCon 2010 - War of the species
The following projects were done by Alon Kadury and Dr. Valid Talis in GeekCon 2010. The purpose of all GeekCon projects is a non-practical project, that will be fun to do.
In this project tried to find a solution to one of the oldest problems females faced from the beginning of time – how to make husbands do house work.
Knowing what drives males is easy. Trying to simulate geek female thoughts is much harder.
We began our journey with one thing we found in common – love for Wii and ended up integrating a broom to a PC.
In the counter project (how to make the wife leave the PC), we used a TV remote control and Arduino to activate applications and simulate keystrokes. This is also good for games which require unique keyboard combinations. At the end of the project we used the TV remote as a keyboard extender to unique key combinations (e.g. Ctrl + Alf + F7).