Botanicalls

Botanicalls is a project submitted by four students to NYU ITP's Winter Semester Show:

"The project originally spawned from completely non-technical conversations about indoor container gardening and the air-filtration qualities of common houseplants. Our concern about bringing plants into the ITP community was their chance of survival-- high-paced technologists seldom have time to stop and smell the flowers, let alone water them. 'But, what if,' we wondered, 'the plants could call us and tell us what they needed when they needed it? If they assigned us tasks, would this alters or engages us,' and the project was born."

As you can see from the diagram above, their solution used environmental detectors, Arduino microcontrollers, and XBee wireless communicators to bind the plants in the ITP offices into a network. Then they gave this network the ability to communicate with its human cohabitants by connecting it to the office phone lines via Asterix.

The end result seems to be that they've given a rather eloquent and self-aware voice to a series of otherwise mute plants. What other silent omnipresent companions do we have that might benefit from getting a voice of their own?