NIMRAH SYED

Me & You is an interactive IoT installation designed for music lovers and couples to express their emotions creatively. The concept behind it is to stream music wirelessly and display the emotions on an LED matrix based on the lyrics of the song. Here, we have recreated the music video of "You Belong with Me" by Taylor Swift.

The most important aspect of this project relied on the emotions communicated through the LED matrix during the song being played. I worked on translating the emotions from the lyrics to the LED matrix. When I started associating each verse of the song to emoticons, I had a whole bunch of words waiting for a face on the matrix. Each emoticon had to be simplified in the most basic and pixelated way possible so it could fit in an 8*8 structure of the LED Matrix. I scribbled on a piece of paper trying to make sense out of them so they could eventually be put in a binary way for the code. This really streamlined the connection from words to pixels and visualizing them in numbers for the code became easier.

This project was built based on Photon platform. The web application, developed in Meteor Framework, could continuously send messages to two different photons through TCP protocol, which enables real-time communication. Users could send their emotion directly to the paired LED Matrix or play their favorite music controlled by web or mobile app.

Apart from close connection between a couple, this project could be embedded on clothes or at home. It could also be used in various music events like concerts, in which fans could interact with the performance through music wirelessly. 

Team Members: Ling Ding & Xiangren Zheng (Gary)