The Faux Shaux

As I mentioned earlier, my PComp final will be addressing new uses for payphones.  This is to make useful an antiquated service, as most people use their cell phone or VoIP on a wifi connection.  How can we implement a new use for phonebooths that wouldn’t interfere with its functionality but expand it?

As entertaining as the urine deterrent may be, I’m afraid that it wouldn’t be of much consequence.  It might even perpetuate its use as a urinal, adding a celebrity status to a drunken piss.  I had the idea to make a broadband photobooth.  This would put all of the hardware into better use, making a novelty out of the mundane.

I spoke to many ITPers, faculty and students, and although it’s straight-forward, it’ll take sometime to perfect since there are so many steps to the process.  I’m sure as I move along, the process with be refined.

The user will deposit coins (it is a PAYphone), and dial the number stencilled/stickered.  I’ll have an asterisk account setup to verify the payphone’s number.  Asterisk will then send a HIGH value to the circuit that is soldered to a cannabalised digital camera.  The camera, equipped with a wifi enable SD card (eye-fi), will take ~4 pictures, and upload to a flickr account I’ll setup.

I will make a cardboard prototype, but I do have one of the phonebooths in front of our building in mind, since we have flatscreens in the windows.  Ideally, one of these screens will be streaming the flickr slideshow.  As far as content editting goes, maybe there’ll be a voting system that’ll screen what makes it to the screen.

I am also interested in writing a patch to take pictures every 10 seconds or so when someone uses the phone.  This would be an interesting, to either determine what type of call was made by body language or emotional response.  A time-lapse photography would also be a nice exposé, haha I can see it now, “Lonely Technology.”