Play it on Chrome: https://talking-to-the-birds.herokuapp.com/bird.html
(Website is down in 2023)
I always love making creative work with a theme of “biodiversity,” to illustrate the diversity of nature. We need to stop destroying biodiversity and understand how small we are on this planet. For my week2 assignment, I was exploring which API I could use for my work to demonstrate biodiversity, (I was searching for API associated with paleobiology and birds because I am a bird lover. ) I finally decided to make my week2 project about birds because I think with “voice” as the most important factor, birds stand out. Therefore I made a tool to enable “human-bird communication”(of course, not real.)
My final is to build on this idea because I want to give my computer a role, specifically as the communication officer. Also, instead of calling a specific bird most people usually know the name, I want to illustrate “randomness” and “serendipity.” Thus, I created a planet for each bird family.
I was inspired by Star Trek Enterprise. I like watching stories in which Hoshi as the communication officer enabled interspecies conversation between humans and other species in the universe. Communication is the foundation of interspecies contact. With this foundation, a human could continuously explore, know more species in the universe, and feels that humans are just a small group of all lives.
Technical
Web Speech API
HTML/CSS/Javascript
A-frame (to build the 3D environment)
Bird API(https://www.xeno-canto.org/explore/api)
Express(to get the API)
Node server
(code summary)
Data Visualization
The first part of this project is to make a data visualization space for birds. I created a universe with 252 bird family planets, with each size corresponding to the number of species under this family, (10,912 extant species and 160 extinct species in total, and this information is stored in a JSON file.) Each family planet is named by each bird family name (based on ICZN). People could explore this space via VR or use the common WASD control in FPS games because I choose to use A-frame to build my website and this is A-frame’s default control.
