At Parsons, I took a collaboration studio where we worked with some of the folks behind Spacebrew, a toolkit for connecting interactive objects. SpaceBlue was our project that connected Spacebrew with Bluetooth Low Energy devices.

We created boxes with giant buttons—or “digital instruments,” as we liked to call them—that connected to a computer via Bluetooth. The computer sent the signal-strength information transmitted by the boxes via Spacebrew to a Processing sketch, which turned the data into lovely music and visualizations. Because we used Bluetooth and a local Spacebrew server, we created our own fully self-contained network.

Take that, New School Wi-Fi.

Code for the project available here on Github. We also created a tutorial you can read on the Spacebrew website here.

Gus Faria and I worked together on this project, and he created the delightful video below: