Week 4

As we waited for a decision on the budget from the client, Week 4 consisted of prototyping the ideas we had pitched to the them.

GOALS

As we discussed our ideas for the exhibit with our client, we got more content to clarify our goals for the project and guest experience.

Project Goals :

Our goal for the project to integrate artist Renee Cox’s own art piece with modern interactive technology, and create an immersive experience at the Mattress Factory museum.

Experience Goals :

1. Somaesthetic: Guests use their bodies to control or trigger interaction and animation; in that case, the interactions can emphasise the presence of bodies (both of those in art work and themselves’) – echo with Renee’s art expression.
   
2. Art Space: The interactions expand the 2D artwork to spatial formats. Interacting with the artworks, people are stepping into the immersive space; observing others’ action and movement in the space, guests are expanding their individual experience into an environment – the art space.
   
3. Recreation: Guests’ interactions and poses serve as part of the art pieces, complete the artwork by recreating and regenerating new art formats.
   

PROJECTION INTERACTION 1

The art resources came from our artist Renee. We started with an artwork called Learning Tree and tried to develop interactions based on it.

Considering that we want to connect guests’ body parts to Renee’s work and inspired by our past experience, what we came up with was the idea of detecting their gestures by Kinect to trigger the animation. And as the image itself contained a tree shape, we designed the animation as the tree growing instinctively and were satisfied by its effect. So basically when guests are guided to pose like the men on the bottom, the tree is going to grow into a complete one. To make sure that the guests’ feeling of controlling and affecting the artwork can last longer, we decided to rig all men on the tree as well so that when guests continue to move their arms after the tree has been generated, all men on the tree can still move and react to the guests spontaneously.

TECH FOR PROJECTION INTERACTION 1

The interaction was when the guest create certain pose with their body, a certain animation is triggered. We used Kinect 2 to develop this interaction. We built an algorithm according to the body points so that we can trigger the animation only when we have a certain pose.

HOLOGRAM PROTOTYPE

The other prototype we worked on was a small hologram which used an imagery of Renee’s art work. The hologram projected an image of approximately 2*2 inches. The largest image size we could project in a hologram format was 6 inches.

Our clients seemed to be excited with both our prototypes and suggested if we could use a combination of hologram and projection mapping. They appreciated the contrast between the live size projection mapping and the miniature jewel like holograms.

Considering the short duration of a semester we could deliver an exhibit using only either one of the mediums. The restriction of a small size image in a hologram vs a wall size image we could create with projection mapping drifted us in the direction of projection mapping. Our decision was based on the quality of Renee’s artstyle which could transit the guest into a live sized abstract world.

The team also explored the zoetrope idea further. Instead of rotating the entire structure we would use imagery that would give the illusion of rotation. This would bring down the construction costs and make the idea more feasible. But the idea was not worked upon further due to the small sized imagery the holograms would use.

We started planning tech research and possible interactions as we stepped into week 5.