From 2 - 4pm, 19 students from all over MIT presented their digital snowflakes to one of two videographers in the atrium (1, 2, 3). There were several really cool projects. One I captured on the Sidekick was Ben Dalton's kaleidoscopic snowflake. Coded in Processing graphics programming language, Ben's snowflake takes a video feed from an Apple iSight camera and pipes it into each of six rotated facets. The photos here (4, 5) show a PowerBook's lighted power plug rendered as a snowflake. At 4pm, a roughcut video of each of the participants' presentations was shown (6, 7) including peeks at the sourcecode to show efficiency. Contestants worked with a variety of development tools and languages including Processing, OpenGL, Java, Python and C++. The first prize of an iPod mini went to Hugo Liu for his snowflake which, in 86 lines of Python, mined Googlism for comments on a given famous person, processed the text fragments through linguistic heuristics (rules), and composed an ode to the individual in the first person as text wrapped around a snowflake. Hopefully some of the entries will get posted to the web somewhere. One our way out of the lab it was snowing (8)--what an approriate end to the Snowflake-a-thon.

- mike lee - boston logan airport