The requirement was to inform and entertain the visitors in a pleasant way.
We decided to split the screen in a part for adults and in a part for kids.
The adult content shows one of the core topic the association has: energy efficiency. Short and simple animations explain the visitors different ways to optimize houses to become more efficient.
For the kids we created a well known monster combination game. Four expressive monsters could be recombined by changing their heads, bodies and legs. For the smallest kids we implemented Mr. Zufall who is doing the job by fortune.
The visitor becomes part of the shop. He is leaving something behind, either by using the installation intentially or by just walking around the detection area.
We created two variants types:
The visitors create 3D like painting. A 3,5 × 3,5m detection area in front of the display transforms the visitor into a “digital brush”. Properties such as the velocity or position of the person define the drawing style. Thus So, after hours, the painting reflects the actions and activities of all visitors.
The display acts as a mirror. The mirror image of each visitor dissolves into thousands of individual particles. If the user focuses the installation, his mirror image is recorded on a 10sec replay and becomes a fix part of the gallery. The natural raster of 6×6 individual displays is used to display the replays. A lightweight design was created to reflect the record process, acting as a call to action and guide for the visitor.
6 Kinect sensors track an area of 3,5 × 3,5m in front of the display, with an height of about 2 meters and a minimum distance to the screen of about 0,5 meters. The Kinect image is processed by 3 computers and passed to another machine, that merges all the 6 images to a homogeneous coordinate system. The two visual clients are written in Java based on Processing and OpenGL. Those applications receive the merged kinect image, detect the people and use the individual point cloud to create some fancy stuff. The deterministic garbage collector of the JRockit VM ensures the required 60 frames a second. An ATI FirePro™ V9800 provides a joint view of 2160×3840 pixels channeling trough 4 mini-display ports.
Since our formation we try to realize a passion project at the year end. Last year we developed the visual cover for the musician Karlo Jurina This year Schau! is born. A series of interactive shop window installations.
Keep your eyes open for the next editions.
The series is starting with “All Eyes On You”, a bunch of different sized eyes who follow the passers-by. Simple concept, but the effect was immense. The passers-by loved it especially the kids react with the installation without any inhibitions.
We used a high quality projector and semi-matt foil from the hardware store to project the eyes to the window. They are rendered by a WebGL frontend using a shader sphere effect. The detection is performed by OpenFrameworks and the Kinect.
An Arduino controlled servo motor, pushing a button on the projector remote, is turning the installation on at 4pm and off at 11pm.
In this episode three-dimensional stripes stand up when people walk by and piano sounds are played according to the peoples position and speed.
Basically we used the same hardware setup, but we added amplifier and outdoor speakers to be able to play sounds.
The sounds are played by midi nodes which are send through a nodejs socket-bridge to Apples GarageBand.
The projection planes where cut from plexiglas and semi-matt foil was glued to it.
Animated by the 90ties-male-adolescence-dream Samantha Fox, the passers-by can change the words of a random sentence by “touching” the window. Also color and font are changing randomly. The visual outcome is supported by a machine voice generated by apples speech, speaking or singing the originated sentence with randomly selected voices.
A button called “Mr. Zufall” builds sentences by fortune.
We used the same hardware which we used by the episodes before. The frames are standard picture frames covered with semi-matt foil.
The Agency Vorwärts GmbH from cologne asked us to do the complete development, including graphic design, development and installation.
Our setup of choice was a MacMini with a KINECT sensor attached and a 37” Display.
We used processing to program a server that gathers the kinect data, calculates relevant depth information via openCV framework and sends the calculated data via socket connection to a flash application which did the visualization.
Playing with Kinect Sensor.
Having fun testing over and over again, always breaking the record.
Working with Vorwärts was a pleasure very straight briefings, lots of freedom in design and development for us and very nice contacts.