ryancoupe.co.uk
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“Every song has a memory and every memory has a song”
Sitting with family and friends and looking through photographs of your life is becoming non existent. With technology progression is has seen your photographic memories become digital, there is no physical photograph to pass around and share stories with, all your memories are doing now, is sitting on your computer or your FaceBook page.
Learning about your families and friends past has always been a nice thing to do for me, I sit with them and go through old photographs and share stories and learn about family members I never got to meet, concerts/ parties they went too and special parts of their lives which will live with them for the rest of their lives. All these photos that we look through have accumulated over years of collection, passing down generation after generation, but the way I see it now, with everything digital. There is nothing that allows to sit down as a family or friends and share a certain time period of our lives.
From research, I found out that viewing photos is a good thing to do, but I also found that a specific music track can be linked to specific memory. Coming from a music loving family, there are many songs that have a certain story. This is why I have created Memico, Memico is a device that brings the physical side of viewing memories back, but also using our digital advantages to view them.
For the project to work, I have used RFID tags, Arduino and Processing and a Potentiometer. The RFID tags are used to store the photos, comments on the photos and the music track that is linked to that memory. Arduino is used to read the RFID tag that then sends serial data over to Processing, where Processing loads everything onto your screen and once everything is on screen, the potentiometer is used to scroll left and right through the photos on the card.
The reason for me creating this device, is that I wanted to create a way of bringing back storytelling, an learning about your family or friends past. I think that this device does that, because we will have something physical, and having a physical memory we feel like we should share.