Artist-Statement:
In this piece, I use my childhood doll as an interface for engaging with text projected on a screen. The text is inspired by the types of behaviors a child attributes to her doll or imaginary friend, such as "It wasn't me! Lala was the one who broke the vase." The doll has a sensor inside of her that can detect position, which I use to control the speed of text filling up the screen.
I used open-source code from Jared Tarbell's site <http://levitated.net/> as the basis for the text display. After I figured out how to read values from an accelerometer into Flash (thanks Dustin Dupree!), I found a way to control the speed of the text based on the position of the sensor. Simple up-down motion wasn't so exciting, and I hit upon the idea of shaking the doll to "shake" the words out onto the screen - so I needed to capture the rate of change of the sensor's position (thanks Daniel Howe!). mouse-triggered demo page: http://www.technekai.com/lala/lalamouse.html
Jared Tarbell: open-source code