Hackers, artists and nerds of the tri-state area converged on Boerum Hill Saturday for the fifth annual NYC Resistor Interactive Show.

DJ Joelle Sedlmeyer spun disco and Detroit house as ballerinas in flashing LED tutus and headpieces pirouetted under the Megascroller and Mike ‘Supreme’ Fields popped, locked and dropped in a new version of his famous Pexel Shirt. Yeah.

Throughout the evening, hundreds of attendees made their way through the space that was founded six years ago with help from MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis. Among the 20 interactive hacks on display we bring you our top 5 most interesting submissions:

Amit Klein’s Mimi the Magic Mirror — What if your bathroom mirror could set reminders, take photos, display medical information or apply virtual makeup? Klein and his team at Startup Giraffe went through a discovery/brainstorming process about various household objects that could be made smarter with software (specifically embedded Android) and ultimately settled on a mirror. After attaching a camera, attendees were treated to an interactive GIF-generator at the event.

Subway Stories is a collaboration between Alon Chitayat and Jeff Ong, two classmates at NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Alon sketches portraits of New York subways riders for the project and places them in an animated subway projected onto a screen or wall. Users put on headphones and manipulate two handles to control the position of the camera looking into the moving car. Passengers have accompanying thoughts and sounds that play when the camera is focused on them and the handles help you move up and down the car. You can also hear the looped recordings for each individual portrait. Watch their video demo here.


Jakob Theileis, a German artist and engineer, gave us the Painting Robot, or “POB.” Inside the robot is a battery-powered motor that spins a weight and moves the robot — really a ball with pens — over a sheet of paper leaving traces of ink. Hitting an obstacle changes its direction and, according to Theileis, “the randomness makes the painting look natural, not machine made.” Attendees could also manipulate the various obstacles on the canvass to help shape the finished product.

Sophie Kravitz’s HeartBeat BoomBox plays your heartbeat represented as different drumbeat sounds. Attendees placed a finger in one of three medical-grade pulse oximeters which then translated their “beat” into a sound that sped up or down depending on the user’s own heartbeat. This creation was originally made out of a Sony boombox and an interface board that controls three separate sound cards. It debuted at MakerFaire 2013 but was recently updated with a newly designed, sleek, laser-cut facade.

Jonathan Dahan, a Brooklyn-based hacker brought us the Light Plotter made with partners at the School for Poetic Computation. They found an old x/y plotter on eBay traditionally used to draw graphs and charts and altered it to draw with light. By replacing the plotter’s pen with an LED light and putting a camera above to do long-exposure video of the plotted drawing, eventually you get a light photo posted online. You can see an early demo below.

-30-