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Afloat: a spatial exploration with gestures

Ji Young Chun, Manning Qu

A meditative approach to spatial exploration… and bubbles!

http://www.jiyoungchun.com/2017/05/03/afloat/

Description

This playful yet meditative piece is about spatial exploration, utilizing a Kinect for gestural interaction. The sketch is projected onto three layered transparent fabrics hanging from the ceiling, offering a dreamlike environment. The fabrics are diagonally placed so people can effortlessly travel through the space.

The sketch shows hundreds of bubbles that users can interact with their body; they can create a huge bubble or attract bunch of bubbles with certain gestures while listening to relaxing ambient music. The bubbles follow as people walk around the space. Some people might want to play with the fabrics, and when the surface of the fabrics is distorted, it creates unexpected organizations of bubbles while still following the users. You can imagine clean sheets of clothes being hung out to dry while bubbles float around you in the fresh summer air. A beautiful world is created and it reacts to you gently. We want to deliver this dreamlike relief to our audience with our experiments in creative coding sketch, movements and space.

Classes

Sense Me, Move Me

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Together with Another

Danni Huang, Yuqiao Qin

Together with Another is an interactive installation which gives users a sensation of meeting others in parallel worlds

https://dannihuang.squarespace.com/#/together-with-another/

Description

Together with Another is an interactive installation which gives users a sensation of meeting others in parallel worlds.
The installation is made up of 9 see-through silk-screen frames in various sizes. The frames are hung from the ceiling so that the space would be divided to two parts. Users at two sides of the frames could see different parts of their own shadow and also the shadow of the opposite user being mapped and painted on these silk screens, as like users are in parallel worlds. The shadows would be shown and faded in certain rhythm according to the speed of users' movement.
The overlapped area of shadows from two sides would change color. The more they overlapped, the stronger the color change could be. In this way we want to design a sensation that when two strangers meet and doing the similar thing at the same time, they would have a kind of intimacy in parallel world although they do not meet each other in the real world.
(My partner and I are now improving the visual and sound feedback as well as the interaction process after the first user test.)

Classes

Sense Me, Move Me

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Paper Plane

Chang Gao

A magical mixed-reality interaction with digital paper planes

http://itp.cgao.me/itp/smmm/2017/03/10/SMMM-finalproject.html

Description

This project is inspired by childhood memories of the first time we played with paper planes. To the little us, these planes are as real as the ones up in the cloud, with us being the pilots and our dreams being the passengers. To recreated the feeling of magical and playful interactions, I choose Augmented Reality and 3D sketches as the medium. The sketch will only show up when the AR device detected the certain area. In this way, the user will also have an exploring interaction with the space from this experience.

Classes

Magic Windows and Mixed-Up Realities, Sense Me, Move Me

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How Thrilling: Extending the Body

Stephanie Koltun

Michael Jackson’s iconic song “Thriller” and associated dance moves provide a familiar and entertaining prompt to explore how technology extends the body into disparate spaces, through different representations, for unknowing audiences.

http://anotheridea.co/category/classes/sense-me-move-me/

Description

'How Thrilling' uses the familiar song and dance of Michael Jackson's “Thriller” to explore how technology can extend the body into many disparate spaces, through many representations, and for many audiences. Through this lens, the project examines how technology standardizes the body. The project is composed of 4 feeds.

The performing body is presented through two primary representations in feed 1 and 2 respectively: an abstracted stick-figure-like skeleton and an unmodified in-situ RGB image feed. The abstraction encourages an unselfconciousness of the performer while also highlighting its irregularity of motion in contrast to the precise repetition of Michael Jackson's looping skeleton. In juxtaposition, the RGB feed–seen only by an audience in an entirely separate space without the accompanying music–highlights the nonconformity of bodies to any form of standardization.

If the performing body closely matches Michael Jackson's moves or a set time period expires (whichever happens first), the front projection for the performer switches to reveal a live RGB image feed of the audience watching their RGB image feed. For a brief moment, they can communicate across these displays (basically just like Skype, Facetime, etc.) and the audience realizes they are not watching a recording by a live performance. Then, without warning, the projection for the performer reverts back to the abstracted skeletons.

Two additional feeds provide context within the project. Firstly, a constant silent loop of the original Thriller video excerpt gives visual context to the audience watching the RGB image of the performer. They might recognize the actions of the performer in the Michael Jackson video and vice versa. The last feed visualizes the motion trails of the performing body. Without the skeleton, it draws attention to the impercision of our actions despite attempting repetation.

Classes

Sense Me, Move Me