Mobile Midterm: “Mo’Body”

For the MM midterm, Yaminie & I knocked around a few ideas (including a “moblog” that would build on an existing ‘activist’ service that would allow women in India to report on incidents of sexual harassment and an online directory of street art that would allow uploads from phones), but finally settled on something that we felt could be entirely realized in the extremely short development time. We came up with a project that ideally works as an interactive public display of some sort, that can be altered by uploading images. So, “Mo’Body“: a website that displays composite image made up of three (body) parts, all of which are individually alterable (read: replaceable) by MMSing or uploading an image from your mobile phone.

So, to get technical, this is how it works: the user takes a photo of their head, body (torso) or legs, and sends an MMS containing the photo with the appropriate subject (‘head’, ‘body’ or ‘legs’) to “callmitchquick@gmail.com”. There’s a PHP script called “parseMailScript” on my ITP webspace that extracts the image, and sends it to a folder on my directory. Another part of the script resizes the image to a chosen, standard resolution, resaves it, and puts the link in a MySQL database. The actual project is a Flash movie (a .swf file) that, upon loading, runs another PHP script that queries the database for the URL of the resized image and returns the result as a variable in Flash. The Flash movie takes that variable and loads the image into an empty ‘movie clip’. Phew.