Friday, December 7, 2007

Octopi, magic walls and Meso oh my!

For our latest blog posting Dan brought in Simon Conlin. If you don’t know, and I sure didn’t, Simon Conlin is from Flash in the Can. And what is Flash in the Can you may ask, well it’s a “Do It Yourself” festival for new media designers and developers who will learn the latest in interactive techniques and technologies and how to apply them to their own work.” Sounds cool doesn’t it?

Anyway, Simon showed us YouTube videos to demonstrate the different ways Physical Interactivity, like Gesturetek’s technology can be used. I’ve said before that I didn’t think that gesture technology was all that. But after seeing some of the really cool things from the videos I’m beginning to change my mind.

Simon showed us work from a few different people but it mainly centered on Zack Booth Simpson. This video here, I thought was very cool. Zack talks about creating elements based on the gestures of people. Like shining a light on a screen to make flowers grow or swirling a light to create different motions of colour. I thought that was very interesting because it never occurred to me that shining a light on a screen would or could activate gesture technology.

Zack also talks about being inspired by an anime, to create a pool of water that grew life if it was stepped on but once you leave the life then dies off. In this way people would be motivated to walk quickly, jump around and see how much life they could create. But Zach wanted to show the relationship of giving life and taking it away and the fact that you can’t have everything so he designed it so that if you jump/walk/activate it too much all the life dies away.

Watching that little scene I had a burst of inspiration. I thought it would be cool to do a similar thing except have the life in a pond or in a forest or something grow independently without any outside influence. But when someone does activate it instead of creating life like Zach’s I would want mine to destroy life. And the more you destroyed it the longer and longer it would take to grow back once you had left. Maybe even creating it so that if you jumped on it or activated it so much that nothing would ever grow unless the program was reset. I think that’s the basis of life on Earth. How marvelous would Earth be if humans never existed on it? If we were never around to reek havoc on it. We’re the only creature on the planet that destroys its own habitat to live. I think an installation like that would be really cool in a museum somewhere in an exhibit about life on this planet.

Adam Chapman is also featured on that clip but his pieces are not as interesting to me, especially the one where he created an algorithm so that birds flying in the sky would come together in a pattern to create a symbol or word.

Simon also showed us a website of a company called Meso. Meso does incredible things with huge interactive screen and floors that are manipulated by people. For example we saw a video from a George Michael concert, where the band was walking along this giant environment and activating it as they performed. It’s just incredible. There are some images on that page where it looks like George Michael is standing on an overflowing river of colour. Even I would love to see a concert like that. Although I worry about how much the ticket price would be. Giant interactivity can’t be cheap.

Meso also did a cool project with an Energy Globe which is like replica of the Earth that can be programmed to show the affect of different weather patterns and how global warming is affecting the planet on a global scale. Here’s the link for that. It’s definitely something I’d love to see up close.

In addition the class was shown an interactive screen with musical instruments all over it that allows users to play the instruments. Which is basically what my AV/MP assignment with Jeff is but there’s looks a lot nicer. Thankfully ours is only a prototype.

I think possibly the coolest thing that we were shown in Simon’s presentation was the Adobe Interactivity Wall. Adobe, the creator’s of Creative Suite 3, made a giant wall with a slider and infrared camera. So that when someone walked by it would activate and create a scene based on their movements. It was amazing to see and it would be really awesome to be able to create something like that in the class. Especially if it was a giant group assignment, that way everyone could create an vector image of a robot monkey growing wings or a mushroom shooting spikes and it would all come together on a giant wall. And in terms of marketing, for Adobe it was a brilliant idea to sell their new software because people weren’t watching a static ad on TV, but interacting with the ad itself and not being constantly pushed to by but motivated by their own creativity, amusement and enjoyment.

And finally we have the octopus video. Which is a demonstration of amazing camouflage although I’m not really sure why we were shown it. It would make a cool interactive ocean if when you stepped on a plant an angry cuttlefish or octopus swam out and then moved to the other side of the water to hide in a different underwater plant. It would be cool to watch people trying to hunt down the poor octopus.

If nothing else, the presentation did give me a lot of ideas.

Here are a list of the links in this blog entry:

Flash in the Can

Zach Booth Simpson

Meso

George Michael concert

Energy Globe

Interactive music Jam

Adobe Interactive Wall

Adobe Interactive Wall 2

Octopus video

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