Concept
The strong idea of the installation was born certainly from the place that inspired us as soon as we discovered it. This place, so silent that puts yourself in subjection, looks alive. We spent a lot of time in the courtyard in several moments, during both day and night. Every time we visited the courtyard we felt like an element of disturb. The most important inspiration has been a video about the campaign for Green Peace on YouTube. This video gives the right mood of breathing nature that fits perfectly to our concept.
Green Peace
The Campaign for a World We Can Breathe In
We had some troubles about the visual behaviour of the interaction. Initially we wanted to create the fusion through the use of color but the result was to much invasive for the place.
Look at the first trial:
kalma_storyboard.swf
Issues with the code
During the whole process we had some troubles to find the right compromise between the visual behaviour we would to design and the code we had to write. At beginning we started creating a black particle flow that was moved out by the user leaving white spaces on the stage. This kind of code was too heavy to be calculated by the computer. To avoid the use of a huge amount of objects we decided to turn the things upside down, we in fact created a black background that was painted white by an array of ellipses that followed user movements.
For the blob detection everything went right, except for one aspect: we couldn’t track the shadow of the user because of the narrow space we had to build the prototype. We remedied to this problem deciding to track the color instead of the shadow (in our case green color).
The arduino programme was made by two pieces of code, the first one was for calculating the entry speed of visitors, the second one was to make the tube swing.
For the pressure pad code:
we needed to store the time when the first pad was pressed and the same with the second and subtract to each other, to have as result a lapse of time.
For the servo motor code:
our servo motor moves only in a range of 90 degrees, so we had problems to manage it.
To fix these problems Durrell Bishop helped us.
Prototype
The prototype experience was very funny. We achieved a prototype that was very close to the installation we have designed. We are unhappy about we didn’t have enough time to perform the installation in every little details.
KALMA | details | technology | code | prototype | final considerations | credits | download |