Collaborators : Ruoxiao Sun, Jinny Kang
For this project we wanted to make an interactive piece that combines the virtual world with the physical world, thus making the interaction with the virtual world more immersive and active rather than being passive. With this in mind we brainstormed a number of ideas as below.
Inspired from Gabe Interactive Piece of the Apartment. The idea was to make the user the orchestrator of the activities going inside the apartment. The actions of the people, interaction between the people in different apartment etc. We wanted to develop the narrative of the user being this sole controller maybe GOD for the life of the people in apartment.
Inspired from Neil Mendoza Disruptive Devices piece, we wanted to design the Hamster Wheel but in reverse. We found the idea itself very strong, interesting and funny. In order to show the reverse, we decided to make the user do physical activity as create as illusion of generating electricity. As with the idea, it reminded me of the 'Beaver's house' from 'The Chronicles of Narnia' and we decided it would so interesting to create the Hamster's house where the Hamster's are doing day-today activities using electrical appliances. The energy is provided to the appliance by user action.
Inspired by the visuals of Jennifer Steinkamp Impeach Project, VR video games and Projection Lighting work we wanted to create an interactive game in extended reality environment. We wanted to create squishy ball visuals for a big screen. Very ball will have an anchor point and gluepoint. The user can control the position and movement of the ball with the anchor point using posenet. The balls are randomly generated and moving around randomly. Once they cross the boundary of the screen they extend in the room through projections. The game would require the user to pile in all the balls in the screen for which user needs to do physical activity (run, move push, hold etc.) Once the balls are all piled up in the screen the user wins. It was an interactive installation. But due to the scope of the time and project we decided to not go ahead with the idea.
