For our “sensor” assignment, we were required to either record sensor readings to a web-based database or we could read information from a web service and represent it in a physical computing object. My partner Estee Wah and I decided to do the latter by grabbing traffic “incident” information for NYC and representing the current status in a unique way. We made a poster that depicts a road running to the horizon, with a cityscape in the distance.
Each of the four road lines are three dimensional translucent paper with a white LED behind them. The LEDs are then flashed in sequence to simulate movement (via an Arduino). As the number of traffic incidents increases, the delay between the LEDs flashing increases, slowing the perceived movement…as if one is in slow traffic.
Roady is programmed by grabbing a single <incident> tag from a PHP script that gathers XML traffic data via a customized RSS fee from Yahoo. Each <litem> node that Yahoo returns is one incident, so we simply count the number of items to get our traffic scaling factor.