PennApps

Alex and Kyle are having a pee problem. 

“Dude,” Kyle says. “It is impossible to see this.” He squints at the screen, which is displaying a feed of images from a webcam hooked up above a yellow toilet. The toilet is sitting next to the desk.

“I really think we need the green toilet,” Alex says.

“Okay,” Kyle agrees. “Let’s use the green toilet.” 

Thankfully, the liquid that Alex is spraying into their hack isn’t actually pee. It’s just water and yellow dye. But they keep calling it pee anyways, and it’s throwing me for a loop.

In fact, their whole project is throwing me for a loop—I don’t know what’s going on, and the two of them are so excited about it that I can’t get them to explain it to me for more than 20 seconds at a time. 

Finally, Kyle takes a moment away from the visibility problem—their webcam isn’t identifying the “pee” as it streams into the toilet—and explains: “We want people to recognize the musical potential of their pee.“ 

Then he adds, “We’re not sure what that means yet.” It might be a urine-controlled MP3 player—aim left to go to the next song. Or it might behave like a steel drum, where the user can, uh, shoot different places to play different notes.

They don’t know yet. But they do know is that they need to use the green toilet—and that’s progress.

TL;DR

The Team: Kyle Hardgrave (Penn) and Alex Rattray (Penn) 
The Hack: Musical Toilet
The Stack: Linux, Python, SimpleCV (Python computer vision library), SoundCloud, Webcam, Toilet

Post by @temiri