About
"The Collaboration" is an interactive lighting installation which appeared on the new facade of the MCA for the 2012 Sydney Vivid Festival. The official collaborators included Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.I.Am, Sydney Artist Justene Williams, American DJ Keebz, and Spinifex Group.
I was commissioned by Spinifex to create the interactive gesture control software in the towers allowing festival-goers to 'play the building'. The talented Rene Christen from Spinifex created the main visualisation software projected on the MCA.
We track the nearest player and draw a 3 x 3 grid of buttons (corresponds to MCA projections) which move and scale according to the player's size and position. The grid buttons also had to have push, drag, and release functionality allowing players to drag the projected artwork around on the building. To achieve this, we measure the z-depth distance between the arm joints (shoulder to elbow, and elbow to hand) for each arm. Then work out the ratios as a percentage of the player's size (I used the torso). This technique would make a good base for creating any GUI like objects for Kinect, e.g. buttons and sliders.
I created a sample Openframeworks project 'Kinect Push Buttons' which shows how this is done on github: github.com/trentbrooks/kinectpushbuttons.
WILL.I.AM "CODING" QUOTES:
Wtf indeed.
THANKS:
"The Collaboration" is an interactive lighting installation which appeared on the new facade of the MCA for the 2012 Sydney Vivid Festival. The official collaborators included Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.I.Am, Sydney Artist Justene Williams, American DJ Keebz, and Spinifex Group.
I was commissioned by Spinifex to create the interactive gesture control software in the towers allowing festival-goers to 'play the building'. The talented Rene Christen from Spinifex created the main visualisation software projected on the MCA.
HOW IT WORKS:
3 Kinect control towers allowed the public to direct the abstract artwork projected on the MCA and rearrange audio loops, controlling the tone and chord progression.
TECHNICAL DETAILS (kinect tower software):
The main issue to solve for the kinect tower software was both kids and adults needed to easily use the interface without any configuration. Using the great tools provided by Openframeworks and OpenNI, I was able to come up with a solution that worked pretty well...
We track the nearest player and draw a 3 x 3 grid of buttons (corresponds to MCA projections) which move and scale according to the player's size and position. The grid buttons also had to have push, drag, and release functionality allowing players to drag the projected artwork around on the building. To achieve this, we measure the z-depth distance between the arm joints (shoulder to elbow, and elbow to hand) for each arm. Then work out the ratios as a percentage of the player's size (I used the torso). This technique would make a good base for creating any GUI like objects for Kinect, e.g. buttons and sliders.
I created a sample Openframeworks project 'Kinect Push Buttons' which shows how this is done on github: github.com/trentbrooks/kinectpushbuttons.
WILL.I.AM "CODING" QUOTES:
- "Code is dope".
- "When I see a coder it's like pirates finding the Caribbean, it's like a whole new thing".
- "Coders are just fresh".
- "Who's the harp motherfucker? Who's Mr flautist? Who created the fucking flute? We haven't seen the Picasso or Mozart or Da Vinci of coding yet".
- "Coding is the new rap".
Wtf indeed.
THANKS:
- Spinifex (Rene Christen & Paul Maher)
- Steve Santer for the video footage
Video from the 2012 Vivid Festival in Sydney.
