The concept
The piece is meant to alter the user’s experience of karaoke based on his or her own chemistry. The concept is to have a breathalyzer built into a microphone that drunk folks are unknowingly using for karaoke. The breathalyzer takes the alcohol blood levels and based on that, warps the video component of the karaoke experience. The words on the bottom of the screen will begin to get blurry in relation to the alcohol level.
The process
Initially, we followed a how-to on instructables.com on how to build a breathalyzer with an arduino but after much difficulty we chose to tweak it and build it with fewer parts. We found the process to be a lot more difficult than we had predicted at first. Many of the parts took time to track down, such as the JST connector.
What went well
We are happy with the result and look forward to creating video content to affect with the data from the breathalyzer.
Contribution
My contribution to this project was the project assembly. I joined this group late, so it was hard to contribute to the overall concept, but I was able to give a fresh set of eyes to the project, and help troubleshoot some of the issues we were having. Originally our plan was to have a microphone detect the alcohol level, and have it represent something different on the screen. We weren’t able to come up with this, however, we were able to illustrate our results in the form of a visual graph. This worked out quite nicely as it gave the viewers a real idea of what their alcohol levels looked like. It was interesting to see people who went out drinking the night previous to when we presented, as their levels were distinctly higher than those who did not go out.
I also contributed to this project through documenting our progress through photographs, as shown below.
