Crystal Brusch

No black ice, no blustery winds — just a perfect snowfall for you to play with.

Description

For Winter Forever, Upasana Jain and I, Crystal Brusch, wanted to try out using the Kinect and Processing together. The idea is to let users interact with a delightful digital world. When one or more users enter the Kinect’s field of vision, their silhouette is projected onto a blank space and the snow begins to fall. When a snowflake touches any part of their “body” (silhouette), it performs a small bounce and melts. The touchless interaction should seem like magic, but involved a lot of trial and error with libraries like toxilibs and box2d. Ultimately, we settled on using color to detect the presence of a “body” to mimic the physical action of snowflakes melting on contact. We are still working on getting a light snowfall when no user is present and then creating a heavier and more playful snowfall when a user is present. This should be complete by our final presentation on Friday.

Classes

Interactive Applications in Physical Spaces