All my work for the R&D task can be found here

The project I’m working on is called “Global Feeling” and is a collaborational project with Jas Hughes.

Here are some teasers 🙂

I loved loved loved this workshop! It was basically “only” a refreshment of our learnt skills from last year but with some small additional steps. It is obviously great to learn new skills but working with knowledge you already have and updating that… I just don’t feel as big of an idiot. I know what I’m doing, I’m good at it (most of the time) and it’s just simply fun!

We started of cutting up the robot below. Because different parts are covered up by other body parts, we had to fix that by drawing and copying in the missing bits. With all the different body parts on different layers we could now import our robot in to After Effects and start animating him.

The first two steps were to place the anchor points and parent the different parts to each other. By parenting the body and the the legs to a null object the robot was also able to rock from side to side. The background we used is a picture of the Lincoln cathedral. To place the robot in to the middle of the town we masked the houses in the foreground and placed the robot between the front and background image. We parented the null object and the two images with another null object which moves up and down every time the robot moves forwards that that it looks like the earth is shaking.

Later on I added some sound to make it all more dramatic and voilà this is what it looks like:

The next step is to find a way to add sound to the interactive floor. What I have thought of is this:

Every footstep triggers a sound instead of a light maybe even in edition to the lights, adding visuals always makes things better. Depending on were you are in the room the sound changes from higher to lower notes on the y-axis and the kind of sound on the x- axis (see below, left). So that when someone walks across the room they will e.g. go down a musical scale. A similar concept is used for this Matrix (below,right). Do check it out cause it’s really fun to play around with and “make music”.

If possible an even floor just like a huge touch screen would be perfect. But I know that’ll be difficult and expensive to achieve. Another way to do it would be like in the video below using wires across the floor for every note. This way one could still achieve some sort of evenness, but you would only have the run from high to low notes (only the y-axis) and I don’t know if one could include visuals anymore.

Or one could have different panels. A friend and me went to an exhibition where one of the installations was this room (below). On a big screen they showed you which panels to step on. It would then take a picture of the room and print it out and generate a new random pattern to recreate with the panels. Most people pinned their picture to the wall but I decided to keep mine. I’m glad I did! With panels you could have the y and x-axis but it’s quite a visible thing compared to a touch-screen-kind-of-floor. I don’t really know what the greater good of such a floor is but it would be great fun and would get people of all ages together, interacting with each other and making music together!

I had this idea of an interactive floor for some time now. The concept is fairly easy but I think it might be difficult to realise. When you walk across the floor, every footstep triggers a light. The light spreads and fades so that you can’t only see where someone has walked along but also how long ago. I can imagine this kind of floor being great in a gallery or museum. Obviously it works better the darker the room is to make the lights more visible. It could look something like this:

Looking at the different categories (see last post) we could choose from, “lights on floor” didn’t really fit in with any of them. Since I’m not only interested in visuals but also music/sound I started researching in that area. I remembered an exhibition my dad was telling me about in the Science Museum in London but because I didn’t know when it was or what the name was that memento didn’t really help. However looking for it I did find some other really cool things. My favorite one is demonstrated in the video below. Sound Fountain is an installation which captures and replays sounds in the space in which it is placed. More about it here.

What I love about this is that it’s almost philosophical. Every single person and every single sound contributes to the whole thing. Everyone is important  and no one is forgotten, even when there is no one left in the room.

We have all used different forms of technologies before. Phones, laptops, radios, microwaves, lights. There is a huge variety of different technologies but all of them with a set function. So why not find a new or different way to use our devices, maybe even combine them in a way never thought of before. This is what the second skill is all about: Being more creative and ground-breaking with ideas and the way we find solutions.

In the workshop we looked at some examples for interactive design:

Chris O’Shea who among other things created a giant television for the Royal London Hospital with interactive games  on it. Woodland Wiggle is a permanent installation at the hospital which helps children benefit from the healing powers of art and play. More about this project here.

Hellicar and Lewis worked on a project called Divide By Zero which was an interactive dance performance. Using computer vision they were able to capture the dancer in real time and project generated visuals in response. More here

Toy Hacking in this example making a battery-powered toy react to tweets. In this case they use a circuit board that connects to a computer so that they can pull data of the internet and use it to control things back in the real world.

There are many more things we looked at which were just as impressing and interesting as the 3 projects above. Another site that is worth checking out is Digital London. We also looked at examples of work in flash and processing. And now it is our turn.

Our task: to create a 6 page pdf-file demonstrating our own idea for interactive media choosing one of the following:

• making simple music
• the death of newspaper/books
• personal security
• the digital doctor
• toy hack
• I protest