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Sense, Deploy, Communicate: MSc Connected Environments Degree Show Summer 2024
19 August 2024
Explore advances in digital technologies that allow us to better understand our environment with a visit to Sense, Deploy, Communicate, an intriguing display of work from UCL's MSc Connected Environments students for their end of year degree show for 2024.
Advances in digital technologies are providing us the means to sense, visualise and better understand both our built and natural environments.
These Connected Environments are at the forefront of emerging science, interlinking the Internet of Things (IoT), Aritficial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) and Data Science.
The MSc Connected Environments programme at UCL East is run as a living lab, making use of our campus and the surrounding Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to support the development of sensing devices and platforms from concept to prototype and deployment.
The projects presented in this exhibition respond to a brief to 'sense, deploy and communicate' and they address a wide range of real-world challenges, from environmental monitoring to augmented living solutions.
Sense, Deploy, Communicate is a free exhibition open to everyone.
Location: First floor galleries, UCL East Marshgate, E20 2AE.
Date: 19 August to 5 September 2024
Time: 10am to 6pm
Dr Leah Lovett, who is the degree show curator from the Connected Environments programme team, shares just a few of the many intriguing exhibits in the show:
"The works are really varied. One piece acknowledges that the way we use devices like Alexa and Siri often relies very heavily on voice command and explores what would happen if we used sign language instead to trigger some of those responses.
"There’s a helmet for miners that can detect safety issues and different mining scenarios.
"We have a portable sensing device, which is thinking about how we could use crowd sourcing and citizen science with sensors worn around people’s necks to collect maps of air pollution, for example.
"One student has created an interactive light piece that responds to sounds to create different designs.
"Another student has been working with sensing in the river, so looking at the health of our waterways with an installation facing out towards the water next to Marshgate to show how this project exists in the real world outside.
"There’s a piece about hydration centring on a cup, encouraging us to keep well hydrated. The cup can sense the liquid in the cup and from that can map your water or drink consumption.
"One project using movement sensors looks at the numbers of people coming in and out of the building.
"One of my students was very interested in how mythological figures can be understood to convey something, for example people's historical understanding of climate events. Really extreme weather events were often interpreted through the lens of mythology and this project looks at what that tells us, longitudinally, in terms of climate, and weather events.
"It activates as people walk past and the aim is to share understanding of traditional cultures and environmental changes. The idea is that by reviving ancient stories it sparks an interest in environmental science too.
"Another fascinating display is about how we attune to each other and how that attunement is picked up through brain signals. You mirror each other's brain patterns. Sensory inputs can induce that effect too, in particular smell. Calming smells can put you in a state of greater attunement to other people.
"So this project is exploring the link between smell and emotion and emits a scent when brain signals attune. Which is pretty cool!”
Find out more about the UCL MSc in Connected Environments