Idea & Realization

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.

Idea

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:

Interactive 3D Painting

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.

Particel Silhouettes

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.

Realisation

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.