Shadow Catching Prototype
Concept
I decided to design an interactive space that would react to people's shadows as they walked into the lobby. On our tour we observed that the lobby was a dead space and not somewhere people enjoyed staying in. Also, when you entered it was unclear where you needed to go, as they had removed the traditional check-in counter and I wanted to help guide new guests correctly.
Technical Details
This was a 'skills upgrade' workshop, so inspired by the shadow installations by the like of Mine-Control I decided to do something similar myself. Detecting shadows, and then reacting to them is very processing intensive so I needed to use something faster than Flash or Processing which I'm used to. The Rockwell Group use openFrameworks a huge amount so I decided this would be a good opportunity to try learn a new skill.
After a few days battling the sharp learning curve of C++ and using XCode, I managed to get a basic demo up and running. In the future, I hope to build on this experiment further.
Photos
- context
- Interactive Spaces @ CIID
- Duration
- 1 week
- Faculty
- James Tichenor & Joshua Walton (The Rockwell Group)
- TeaM
- Kevin Cannon
- Role
- Concept generation, OpenFrameworks C++ programming
Visitng the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, as inspiration for the course
The Arne Jacobsen designed hotel is a landmark building in Copenhagen
The prototyping was built with the OpenFrameworks software.
An AVT Guppy Camera used for testing.
A big challenge was figuring how to map the projection back on to the shadow.
Testing a prototype, catching a shadow ball.