Winter Comes to the Forest
Viewers transform into trees by holding their arms straight from them. The longer they can hold their arms straight, the more leaves their tree grows. When viewers get tired and their arms fall, the tree loses its leaves and fades to the background.
How Strong Are You?
Winter Comes to the Forest is a gallery installation using a Kinect with SimpleOpenNI and Processing to create an interactive projection. Viewers when they enter the space show up as faint silhouettes. But as soon as they raise their arms to meet over their heads, the pose recognition triggers. A thin line appears, which is actually a procedurally generated tree, with the branch values off-vertical all set initially to zero. The software maps the branch expansion theta values to the off-vertical theta values of their arms as they lower them.
When the viewers' arms are horizontal, the tree is at maximum expansion. If they hold that position, leaves start to sprout. After about thirty seconds, birds also appear, flocking to the tree.
For a more elaborate installation, the viewers select objects from a table with embedded microcontrollers. The microcontrollers communicate via RF to the computer running the installation. The computer generates a tree specific to those object combinations, and then plays an audio file of someone telling a story of their life as the birds flock.
The thematic goal of the fully realized installation is to have objects that are light correspond to children, who have yet to accrete the narratives of older people. The oldest, most developed stories are paired with the heaviest objects. The idea is that there are some stories too embedded, too contextual, with too much history to bear their full telling. The hope is that there will be stories in the installation which cannot be completed, yet will leave viewers with an appreciation and awareness of the breadth of stories each of us has.
Viewers transform into trees by holding their arms straight from them. The longer they can hold their arms straight, the more leaves their tree grows. When viewers get tired and their arms fall, the tree loses its leaves and fades to the background.
How Strong Are You?
Winter Comes to the Forest is a gallery installation using a Kinect with SimpleOpenNI and Processing to create an interactive projection. Viewers when they enter the space show up as faint silhouettes. But as soon as they raise their arms to meet over their heads, the pose recognition triggers. A thin line appears, which is actually a procedurally generated tree, with the branch values off-vertical all set initially to zero. The software maps the branch expansion theta values to the off-vertical theta values of their arms as they lower them.
When the viewers' arms are horizontal, the tree is at maximum expansion. If they hold that position, leaves start to sprout. After about thirty seconds, birds also appear, flocking to the tree.
For a more elaborate installation, the viewers select objects from a table with embedded microcontrollers. The microcontrollers communicate via RF to the computer running the installation. The computer generates a tree specific to those object combinations, and then plays an audio file of someone telling a story of their life as the birds flock.
The thematic goal of the fully realized installation is to have objects that are light correspond to children, who have yet to accrete the narratives of older people. The oldest, most developed stories are paired with the heaviest objects. The idea is that there are some stories too embedded, too contextual, with too much history to bear their full telling. The hope is that there will be stories in the installation which cannot be completed, yet will leave viewers with an appreciation and awareness of the breadth of stories each of us has.