To coincide with Halloween, Digital Shoreditch arranged an appropriately themed hack day – the ‘Scareathon’. We headed down to the Ravensbourne campus on a crisp autumn morning with some random boxes of technology, and a few harebrained ideas about how to scare folk. Fuelled by unlimited sweets, pizza and energy drinks, we managed to hash our ideas and technological bits-and-bobs into an audio/visual and hardware based installation – the ‘Humanity Test’. The idea behind our creation was to make a futuristic version of the feely-box, where you stick your hand inside a dark box and strange things start to happen! We used a Makey Makey, an old theatre light, some conductive paint, and a webcam to put together our multimedia feely-box. Using MAX and Ableton Live we then created an interface which led people through the Humanity Test. Instructed by a HAL style voice they monitored their hand on screen and performed a distractive task which culminated in a sudden electric shock sound accompanied by the sight of a scissor-wielding hand snipping at the their fingers!
We had a fantastic time and our Scareathon hack was judged the scariest at the end of the day, and was featured on the MSN UK tech blog.
Thanks to my wonderful co-collaborators, Alex and Rob!