I was always interested in how the Kinect from Microsoft's XBOX worked. So my first experiment involved making this crazy, homemade, DIY TV with four channels. I was learning the application MAX/MSP Jitter and was becoming crazy-obsessed about it. I began to mix period set design, physical computing with circuitry, wiring, and code, along with video manipulation.
My result: As the user turns a potentiometer (basically a knob) they come across 4 channels while looking into a TV. On the 3rd channel, the TV detects the user and "sucks" him/her into the set.
All static, distortion, fading between videos, colors, rotating, and spinning, and especially user background capture -- is all done with "patches" (a type of coding) in the application Jitter.
This was all fed into the Arduino environment controlled by the potentiometer.
I had great fun with this experiment. When I finished it reminded me alot of the old episodes of "The Outer Limits." And I ended up incorporating the beginning intro of this show into the project.
Here is the result: