This installation reacts to passers by: when they look at the wall a haunting white face stares back. This is really intended for some dark and creepy bar over a cosy living room.

interaction and simulation

Step 1: approaching

The installation responds to people nearby. If nobody is near the installation lies dormant.

When a person is detected a haunting mask is projected onto the wall. The mask is a mirror image of the person’s face. If you move around the installation the mask follows you.

Step 2: starting interaction

Step 3: following the participant

Step 4: add more people

When multiple people enter the installation the effect is more haunting. The haunting theme can be developed further to perhaps project video clips on top of the masks. The videos I have in mind are horror clips with screaming or flashes of a knife then returning back to the masks.

kit

So how does it work? The installation needs a couple of things:

• Laptop – to monitor the webcam and project the masks
• Projector – to project the Masks on a nearby surface,
• Camera – to search for people’s faces.

The detecting faces is the tricky part. I use some free face tracking software, with several limitations:

• performance – loading web cam footage is very slow with Processing,
• lighting – face tracking only really works in ambient light looking straight at the camera,
• reliability – it’s hard to find real faces as people move around, etc…

As reliable face tracking entails restrictions on lighting and environment I’ve changed direction for future installations so they exploit or are robust to unreliable face tracking.

In this installation virtual butterflies are projected on a wall and passers-by can interact with these butterflies and change their behaviour. The experience of interacting with butterflies in this way is intuitive and fun.

The Installation setup: a person, a wall, a camera and projector.

The context for this work spans a couple of my interests: technology, nature (albeit simulated) and people. I think there’s lots of interesting scope of elaborating what people think about technology. I also want to both challenge the convention that playing with technology is only for geeks and make technology more accessible generally. IT is showcased and taught poorly in contrast to the traditional sciences. For example The London’s Science Museum, which has lots of little experiments and games presumably in the name of education, is depressingly low tech. The most high tech experiment was a circuit board where you could wire together a light bulb!

When first exhibiting my butterflies installation to the public I expected an indifference towards the technology and how the butterflies worked, but I was pleasantly surprised. People were interested in the technology so why did I have this expectation? Of course is wasn’t my misconception no! Let’s think about it more abstractly. Popular culture celebrates technology but mostly through a polished and passive consumerism: it’s more common to buy technology than to experiment with it. Is consumerism a barrier making people less creative with technology? Was experimentation with technology more common with our parents, or was it only my dad playing with electronics? Interesting but let’s return to the Butterflies installation.

interaction and simulation

Step 1: Person approaches the Butterflies

The interaction is simple: the butterflies move away from you. The butterflies behaviour is programmed to be scared of you: they quickly disperse and slowly regroup together. This behaviour is only one of interactions the Butterflies are capable of but it’s a simple and engaging interaction.

Step 2: Butterflies react to person and disperse.

The Butterflies are made more realistic by their grouping behaviour, their “flocking”. Creating flocking behaviour on a computer is a relatively new idea and entails a set of rules a computer churns through to make the virtual butterflies look more realistic.

Step 3: Butterflies regroup away from person.

kit

So how does it work? Let’s first inspect the kit needed to set this up. The installation needs a couple of things:

• Laptop – to run the Butterflies simulation,
• Projector – to project the Butterflies on a nearby surface,
• Camera – to record people’s movements.

The interesting bit is detecting people’s movements reliably with a cheap camera. There is, fortunately, a cheap way of making computers interactive. The expensive route is called an ‘interactive white board’ widely used in schools across the UK. Interactive white boards allow people to interact with a computer using special pens to draw on the computer screen and control the computer. The cheap interactive white board uses a Wii Remote as a camera to watch people interacting. The WiiRemote has an infrared camera. Infrared red cameras can only see light sources such as candles and cigarette lighters, but if you’re feeling more creative: some home made LED lights. The WiiRemote tracks the light source and moves the mouse on the laptop.

My installation in Brixton Market used a ‘wand’ to interact with the Butterflies. This wand housed an LED, which was tracked by my WiiRemote, and controlled my laptop and disturbed the Butterflies.