May 3-7, 2005
Thesis Presentations
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| LightPlay | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Jonghoon Choe | |
| Instructor: | Barton, Jake | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/~jc1436/thesis | |
| Keywords: | ||
| LightPlay is a lighting installation designed to entertain its users by generating patterns of light and sound in response to their physical actions. | ||
| ¡ Focus: How can light, which is intangible and formless, be the medium of enjoyment like playing with toy? ¡ Direction: I will create a lighting toy that provides physical interaction amongst people. Light is the substance that can strongly affect human emotion. People feel different emotions to the light they see. Dim and indirect light effects relaxation and calmness, bright and colorful light tends to create excitement, and flashing light directly on a person’s face may cause anxiety and fear. Among different kind of emotional effects that light can give us, the joy will be the principal focus of my project. By playing with each other, people create intimacy and relationship. When children, adults, or even animals derive certain pleasure from an activity or things, we call such type of behavior a play: and one of the most effective and powerful method of play is by using a toy. The light which used to serve practical purpose in our daily life has become a mode of creative toy and art. In a case like a dance club or a lighting art installation, the light functions as a plaything that creates interaction with people. The basic theme of my project is how humans can enjoyably interact with light like playing with a toy. | ||
| Personal Statement: | I have been fascinated with lights and their effect on human emotion since I studied industrial design at college. For the first time then, I tried to deal with light as a medium and became immersed with it.
Even when walking on the streets of downtown in a big city like Seoul and New York, I couldn\'t help fixing my eyes on the flashy neon or LED animated signboards around me. Those splendid visuals of electric lightings have motivated me to work with the light. Since joining Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, I have experienced diverse ways to give interactivity to one-way media. I have also gotten a clue to realize my interest in light into an interactive work by LED(Light-Emitting Diode), the effective material for electric lighting. While studying in ITP, the primary focus of my works was enjoyment. My first two projects were to make moving robot toys by using a servo motor and a micro controller. The main concept was simply to enjoy watching and controlling my robot toys. My simple principle, using interactive technology for enjoyment, has been constant theme in my various works. Thus, the concept of my thesis project, which is to combine light and entertainment, originated from such personal experience and preference. | |
| Context: | I conducted a research to explore the interaction between light and human being in the range from an individual artist to a commercial lighting industry. My investigations targeted the relationship between light and people or light and our environment. Each investigation has their own specialty from diverse angles, such as social, personal, public and commercial aspects. My research topics relevant to my project are as follows.
Glowing Places - by Philips Electronics Flexgrid - by James Clar Jim Campbell - Interactive lighting artist Mathmos Lights - Interactive lighting design company One of my previous projects was also mentioned as a previous investigation. Timebrick -Experimental lighting installation ¡ Glowing places (2005) -Lighting for social interaction The below is partially quoted from the article in Philips web site. Glowing Places is the result of the collaborative project of Philips Electronics design group, Philips Design, and the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in London to explore innovative ways for people to interact with light in public spaces. Glowing Places uses interactive lighting, embedded in public seating, to respond to people\'s presence and behavior. The plastic seating, embedded with LED strips and sensors, measure the presence of people over time. Both the number of people sitting and the length of time they stay create a \'social interactive pattern\' that is translated by patented software into lighting effects in the furniture. Many people sitting for brief periods of time result in lighting activity expressing a busy period, whereas one or two people sitting for a longer period trigger mellow lighting. The result is lighting that stimulates social interactions in public spaces. The dynamic lighting systems make public places, waiting rooms for example, more pleasant, because in contrast to static artificial lighting the Glowing Places concept emulate aspects of changing natural light. As well as being a social catalyst, the illuminated chairs create a valuable personal space, giving a feeling of rest, tranquility and personal connectivity. Applications for the Glowing Places concept include public spaces such as shopping malls, subway stations and other static artificially lit indoor spaces where people gather. Glowing Places is built on Philips Designs research on the theme of the \'emotional building\' - a building that responds to the behavior and feelings of its users by visually expressing the activity inside. With this in mind, Glowing Places demonstrates the importance of lighting to signify the changing emotional states.? Glowing Places brings an important clue to my project concept. It converts peoples\'s everyday behavior just sitting on a chair and chatting with others\'s meaningful lighting sign. Any intentional action or operation is not required of users to interact with it. People just want to sit on chairs in ordinary public spaces to rest and then, leave. The chair reflects people presence with light. Many interactive projects demand users to do ‘intended?actions for interaction. This may also be one of the reasons why people get sick and tired of them easily. If a certain interactive work allows people to be with it in their natural behavior as a meaningful interaction, people may enjoy it for a long time without getting bored. ¡ Flexgrid (2004) -Lighting on individual aspect James Clar is a lighting and visual system designer who works in New York and Tokyo. This bendable LED display was created to be embedded onto a dress that will be showcased at the Milan Triennial 2005 in January. The display will react to sound, allowing the dress to react to users who \'talk\' to it, giving the dress a \'personality\' of its own. Flexgrid has some important clues and similarities to my thesis concept. First, it enables tangible and active interaction with human body. It has broken the rigid ideas that we can just look at lightings passively or view them merely as a hard and stiff material like plastic, wood, or iron. A certain distance always existed not only physically but also mentally between lights and viewers. It was not easy to try to actually touch a light because of the prevalent concept that light is not a tangible object. In this regard, Flexgrid is a good trial to narrow the physical distance between people and light. Flexgrid also seems to have a potential to become a toy for kids even though it was originally created as a costume for the fashion show--its tangible interaction enables such possibility. Flexgrid also takes the form of a grid composed of square cells like my project and shows that many different combinations of lighting animation can be generated by the 8 x 8 LED matrix. ¡ Primal Graphics (2002) -Lighting art in public Primal Graphics, which is one of his representative lighting art installations built at Battery Park in New York, a shadowy figure runs across an empty field. Up close, it is apparent that the lifelike movement is the result of pulsating lights, and the screen is a 10 x 13 foot grid composed of 192 light bulbs. To create this work, Campbell recorded his subject in digital video, a medium that converts live action to millions of pixels; he then reduced the number of pixels until the image reached the verge of perceptibility, leaving just enough data to retain the outlines of reality. - Barbara Pollack, Creative Time Jim Campbell is an interactive lighting artist who studied Electronics and Mathematics at college. His lighting installation projects explore the relationship between information and its meaning, in the context of reduced or compressed levels of information. He used light as the medium to convey that minimized information and the contrast of light and shadow generate the movement of information. ¡ Mathmos Lights Mathmos is the lighting design company based on London established in 1963. They have been producing various kinds of interactive lighting fixtures. Their products have gained considerable reputation and success from the design critiques and the worldwide market. Their success lies in their products?elegant design and innovative interaction method. The lightings of Mathmos have elevated the simple level of operation between lighting fixture and users, like just flickering a switch, to a sophisticated, emotional interaction between light and human being. My experience of the delicate physical interaction with Mathmos Tuba, which is one of the best selling items of Mathmos that I possess, was actually one of the inspirations which started me thinking about human\'s tangible, emotional interaction with light. ¡ My previous investigation In the fall semester of 2004, I conducted a project about the relationship between light and time. The project entitled TimeBrick was a preliminary research for my thesis. TimeBrick is the brick-looking interactive lighting that uses light as the medium for the interaction between time and human emotion. It was designed to satisfy human desire to manipulate time. Glowing dots dropping down from inside of the translucent box were supposed to symbolize flowing time. I intended to make the user have the feeling of manipulating the time by changing the brick standing direction. For example, users felt satisfaction by leaning the brick on the wall or laying it down if they desired to slow down or pause the ever-flowing time. Of course, in normal situations, TimeBrick plays a role of an ornamental lighting on the desk. The concept of this project was judged to be a successful trial as it expressed the relationship between light and human emotion. This idea has also provided basis to my thesis project. | |
| Audience: | This project is expected to be a home installation. Accordingly, the target audience is almost all age groups of both sexes. Children 5 to 15 years old might be the most active users of the fixture as a toy or game. However, adults who are interested in ornamental lightings or interactive art are also a major target audience.
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| User Scenario: | LightPlay is a grid composed of a certain number of square panels. It is expandable by adding modular panels. Each panel contains its own light/sound/sensor module and independently reacts to its users?movement.
LightPlay has three different interactive modes, described below. 1. Normal mode Panels repeatedly blink according to a preprogrammed, animated pattern. The default pattern is time flowing successively lower panels being lit, suggesting the passage of time. 2. Movement trace mode Each panel, which has an IR sensor, gradually lights up and down when a person passes by. In other words, whole grid reflects the trace of passing person. This function is intended to generate reaction to the user\'s ordinary, simple behavior walking around the house. 3. Wake-up mode With the built-in clock module, LightPlay can be used as an alarm clock. When the set time is reached, panels start randomly blinking and an appropriate alarm is sounded. If the user throws a light object (e.g., a rubber ball, doll, or pillow) at LightPlay and hits any panel, it stops blinking and ringing. However, after a few seconds, the lights and ringing return. This interval gets shorter and shorter according to the number of times a panel is hit. Ultimately, LightPlay will lead its user to get out of bed, walk over to it, and turn the alarm off directly. 4. Custom pattern record/playback mode (for the next step) A user touches the panels in whatever order he chooses for a certain length of time. LightPlay memorizes the pattern and plays it back repeatedly. | |
| Sources: | ¡ Similar Projects & Companies
James Clar : http://www.jamesclar.com Glowing Places : http://www.design.philips.com/about/design Jim Campbell : http://www.jimcampbell.tv Mathmos : http://www.mathmos.com Element labs : http://www.elementlabs.com TimeBrick : http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/~jc1436/is1 ¡ Technical Guideline & Resource Physical Computing : http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/~tigoe/pcomp Technical Adviser : Michael Luck Schnider (ITP researcher) Joon-Seo Lee (Multimedia designer, ITP alumnus) Jin-Yo Mok (Media artist, ITP alumnus) ¡ Written thesis Commenter & Proofreader : Benjamin Lukoff (Amazon Editor) Philip Herter (Writer) ¡ Parts Stores LED: http://www.superbrightleds.com Sensors & other electronic parts: http://www.acroname.com http://www.jameco.com Plastics : Canal Plastic (Greene & Canal Street) | |