More and more urban designers are trying to figure out what to do with public spaces and how to make them more enjoyable. For this project we were inspired by designs such as ‘Back to Front’ by Tridel and ‘Strømmer’ by Stig Skjelvik and Snøhetta architects. These art installations mainly use people’s contours to create interactivity in otherwise plain and boring spaces. We wanted to create something similar, with the little knowledge of Open Frameworks that we have, but instead of using people’s contours we wanted to use the colors in the space to create interactivity.
This has resulted in ‘Empty Spaces – Filling the Void’, which is an installation with a particle system [1]. Using a (web)camera, the colors and patterns that the installation makes are decided. The camera uses the color input that it films as a color output for the particles. Furthermore, one of the pixels in the camera is tracked for the color input it receives, based on certain colors the pattern will change (eight options with smooth transitions)[2]. People’s clothes colors and the colors in the surrounding space therefore create a small interaction like those by Tridel and Stig Skjelvik & Snøhetta to simply make a space more playful.
In the future, we would use a bigger screen and better camera. However, when we wanted to test it on the big screen in room 410, the room was either inaccessible or someone else was using it. Consequently, we presented it on a computer screen with inbuilt camera as a proof of concept.
[1] Perevalov, D. (2013). Mastering Openframeworks Creative Coding Demystified: A Practical Guide to Creating Audiovisual Interactive Projects with Low-Level Data Processing Using OpenFrameworks. Birmingham: Packt publ. Chapter 3: Building a Particle System.
PDF of book: http://b.parsons.edu/~traviss/booKs/oF/Mastering%20openFrameworks%20-%20Yanc,%20Chris_compressed.pdf
Accompanying code: https://github.com/firmread/ofDemystified/tree/master/03-Particles-04-Particles
[2] The code for this project is available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g1u5rekeoelmtnc/final.zip?dl=0