At Artissima, the international fair of contemporary art in Torino, visitors are able to use simple hand and arm gestures to browse a visual catalogue of recent art work exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, an important museum in the city.

The technology is based on sophisticated gesture recognition, while the end-result for the visitor is a radically simple content navigation system in which the images are projected on a large screen, and interaction is performed via nothing but a flat luminous surface.

The project was developed by Jan-Christoph Zoels, Yaniv Steiner and Ofer Luft of Experientia, an international experience design consultancy based in Torino.

A prototype of the gesture-based interface was previously used to navigate Google Earth and to guide club dancing during a music rave. The various interfaces are all based on the smartRetina™ technology, which provides the designer with a programmable “eye”, allowing him to easily design new experiences and interactions which do not require a tangible interface.

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“In their efforts to compete with other and more dynamic providers of information and entertainment, many museums are listening to their visitors more closely than ever before,” writes Jennifer Kabat in a long story on the website of the Adobe Design Center.

“In some cases museums—famously top-down institutions—are even incorporating the views, critical choices and contributed content of visitors into their programs. They are also re-examining the ways in which visitors interact with objects and spaces, as well as each other. For help with both of these approaches they are turning to a growing sector of the interactive design world; one that specializes in interactive museum displays.”

“Thus, the best interactive exhibits are open-ended. They encourage visitors to be active participants in the experience rather than passive consumers of information. They take their visitors’ views seriously and break down the hierarchy of institutions.”

Acknowledging the debate (”The idea of the audience taking control sends shivers down many a curator’s spine”), Kabat provides some very good examples of thoughtful integration of user-generated content in museum and exhibition contexts.

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This project by Electroland consists of a luminous field of LED lights embedded into the entry walkway that respond to the presence of visitors; a massive display of lights on the building face that mirror the patterns of the entry; and video displays in the lobby and entry areas.



Environmental intelligence and surveillance of human activity are combined with a video-game sensibility. Activities on the walkway also trigger massive light displays on the building face. When the walkway interactivity is triggered users witness their impact on the building face via a video display. Response is instantaneous.

(via we-make-money-not-art and Interactive Architecture)

This project by Electroland features two glass pedestrian bridges designed as “Interactive Walkways,” each with a field of LED lights embedded in resilient walking surfaces. Sensors detect the presence of people and the system triggers interactive light patterns on the walkway floor.



(via we-make-money-not-art and Interactive Architecture)

“>Nanoscape by artists and researchers Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau is an invisible sculpture that can be sensed via touch.

Users wear magnetic ring-interfaces and when moving the hand over the table of the installation, strong magnetic forces, repulsion, attraction and even slight shock can be felt.

Wireless magnetic force-feedback interface allows users to touch invisible nano particles, thus creating an changing invisible sculpture which modifies its shape and properties as users interact with it and with each other.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

Lightmodulator is a series of projects by architect Nick Rich which work with light and the phenomena of moments in time where light and the materials it lands on or passes through create magical transformations of space. His initial research has been to understand the sun’s movement and the changing quality of light it gives. Analysis of the sun’s movement can be found on his website portfolio ’sun studies’ and ‘daylight - information from the sky’.

Nick explains “I moved on to experimenting with light modulation through different media. The process of making the media; be it a grid, lense or refractor and observing the effects, puts you in direct contact with light in a similar why to making shadow puppets or playing with your shadow. It is this interaction between us and light which I find interesting and which I’m trying to build into my work.”



(via Interactive Architecture)

Bitfall is an installation by Julius Popp where water is being used to project images taken from the internet. A computer observes various news websites and chooses thereafter the images to be displayed. 128 nozzles are controlled by synchronised magnetic valves, and the water drops falling to the ground shape the images. The visual information is only tangible for a second before the drops merge to become water again.



(via Interactive Architecture)

This project by Kellee Santiago (founder of thatgamecompany) allows you to control the character using your body. Tilt your arms to turn and raise them to go faster or lower to slow down. It uses the PhaseSpace motion capture set-up, essentially cameras tracking LEDs on the wearers body. It’s great that the player in the photos is wearing a pijama outfit (like the boy in the game) and I think this system would work best in the free flight mode (which is lots of fun). In Cloud though there are many actions, such as pulling the clouds around or absorbing/releasing them, which is hard to build into a motion capture. This game would work perfectly on Wii though, so get in touch Nintendo!

(via pixelsumo)

An electro-kinetic sound installation by the London based collective Someth;ng, Tape uses simple analogue playback to allow users an arena in which to play with self-recorded sound and explore the effects of playback and sound synthesis. Housed in a transparent acrylic panel, Tape allows its user not only to view the oft-hidden components needed to record sound, but also to manipulate them as they see fit. Using Tape’s continuous tape loop and assemblage of appropriated and hand built electro-mechanical analogue parts, the user can not only record and play sounds, but physically slide, twist and move these components within the panel to explore their roles and uses.



The experience moves away from the precision and care often needed to create audio tracks and allows for the innate curiosity and playfulness that drives us to experiment, in this case, with sound. As sound recording moves ever further into the digital sphere, Tape allows users to explore and play with the analogue processes we now take for granted in our everyday lives.

(via pixelsumo)

Mind Your Head by Philip Marston is a simple and playful installed object which the viewer/participator (by wearing the headphones and walking under and around the suspended light) can audibly experience the invisible electromagnetic frequencies which leak and radiate out of an ordinary fluorescent tube light.

The headphones, with an EMF (electromagnetic frequency) pick-up attached, provide a new form of intimate but unnerving physical interaction with an overlooked mundane object, which hopefully highlights our every increasing environmental exposure to man-made electromagnetic fields.

(via pixelsumo)

Sensing GamePad: Electrostatic Potential Sensing for Enhancing Entertainment Oriented Interactions

This project by Dr. Jun Rekimoto, director of Sony’s Interaction Laboratory, introduces a novel way to enhance input devices to sense a user’s foot motion. By measuring the electrostatic potential of a user, this device can sense the user’s footsteps and jumps without requiring any external sensors such as a floor mat or sensors embedded in shoes. We apply this sensing principle to the gamepad to explore a new class of game interactions that combine the player’s physical motion with gamepad manipulations. We are also investigating other possible input devices that can be enhanced by the proposed sensing architecture such as a portable music player that can sense foot motion through the headphone and musical instruments that can be affected by the players’ motion.

X-Ray
This installation by All of Us offers visitors an insight into the artist’s thinking behind the painting ‘A view on the Stour near Deadham’ in a fun and engaging process. By walking in front of the projected painting, the visitor casts a virtual shadow over the image, revealing an x-ray of the painting underneath. By comparing the finished painting and the x-ray, the visitor can see alterations in the work that Constable had made during its development. The project uses video camera tracking to create the x-ray shadow, slowly fading between the images allowing the visitor to notice subtle differences between the two.



Grid
All of Us’ second installation, Grid, illustrates Constable’s process of ‘squaring up’ an image in the journey from early sketches to finished work. A replica sketch of ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’ is mounted inside an display case, with thread marking out a grid over image (in a similar technique to Constable). The visitor simply touches the glass above the grid to scale up the corresponding section in the full projected painting. The installation reinforces the traditional techniques used by Constable and emphasizes the meticulous accuracy of scale in both his sketch and the final work.

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This installation by All of Us was created for the 18th century Norfolk House Music Room, Plink Plonk used mechanical music boxes as playful delicate input devices, producing their own sound output (the tune ‘You are my sunshine’). A visual narrative responded to the turn of each music box, with each scene containing different reactives. The top photo shows stars glowing around a single music box as it is being turned. The bottom photo shows the end eclipse sequence. Overall it went down really well and had some great feedback.

(via pixelsumo)

London based Sennep created an interactive dandelion for Transvision 2006. Elegantly simple and playful, this installation allowed users to blow away the seeds of a dandelion clock using a real electric hairdryer.

“Blowing it apart is a popular pastime for children. The number of blows required to completely rid the clock of its seeds is deemed to be the time of day.”

(via pixelsumo)

Soundgarten by Michael Wolf is a tangible interface that enables children to record, modify and arrange sound samples in a playful way. Designed as a toy, the garden has 19 plug holes that can fit sounds in the form of mushroom objects. Children can use the pre-defined environmental or musical sounds, or use a wireless microphone to record their own. The three levels of the garden control the sound volume.

Each mushroom object is colour coded and contains an icon to indicate the sound. Effects and filters (echo, resonance, play backwards, increase & decrease) can be applied to sounds using the leaf objects. More than one filter object can be used on each sound, helping the child understand musical and sound principles from an early age.

(via we-make-money-not-art and pixelsumo)

The thesis project by Interactive Design Institute Ivrea laureates Giorgio Olivero and Peggy Thoeny explores design in the realm of social interaction within the context of public space, specifically, a café.

TABLEPORTATION is a local media system designed to fuse mediated and physical space, to experiment and play with social boundaries, to encourage and allow new forms of interplay between people at different tables in the café.

Video cameras monitor the table surfaces, transforming the originally semi-private space into a stage upon which are played out performances of shifting proximities. This unobstusive system ab/uses the technology of surveillance to allow patrons from different tables observe each other, be observed and get in touch.

Interactive light table surfaces enhance, stimulate and provoke self-expression, collective creations and playful communication.

The café becomes a collective playground where the user is participant and producer rather than merely consumer of space and time.

GUI / Graphical User Interface is a re-presentation of the Adobe Photoshop interface within 3-Dimensional space. The illusion is created by using carton, photocopies, glue and sewing thread.

The humorous artwork is made by Joel Swanson who is a digital artist, writer, and researcher investigating the interconnections of literary theory, art, and technology. His work involves the creation of multimedia narratives that exist within digital space (and sometimes within carton space too).

Scrollbars is a series of installations and physical scrollbar-representations created by Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte.

According to Jan Robert, most of us consider the scrollbar to be a virtual object - but in use it triggers reactions such as frustration, which suggests a subconscious acceptance of the inherent ‘reality’ of these objects.

Jan Robert Leegte has been exploring the sculptural properties of internet browsers and software, such as scrollbars, buttons and table borders since 1997.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

Sonicforms by Chris O’Shea is an open source research platform for developing tangible interfaces for audio visual environments. The aim of the project is to improve this area of musical interaction by creating a community knowledge base and open tools for production. By decentralising the technology and providing an easier entry point, artists and musicians can focus on creating engaging works, rather than starting from the ground up. Sonicforms exists as :

1. a central repository for others to learn how to make their own interfaces and share their experiences.
2. a set of tools and strategies for extending open source software to create these projects.
3. a physical installation that will be exhibited showing other artists creative content through online submission.

link to video demonstration

(via we-make-money-not-art)

Glume is a computationally enhanced translucent modeling medium which offers a generalised modular scalable platform with the physical immediacy of a soft and malleable tangible material.

The Glume system consists of soft and translucent augmented interlocking modules, each embedded with a full spectrum LED, which communicate capacitively to their neighbors to determine a network topology and are responsive to human touch.

We envision Glume as a viable tool for modeling, visualization and simulation of three dimensional data sets in which users construct and manipulate models whose morphology is determined through the distributed system. The Glume system provides a new and novel means for expression and investigation of organic forms and processes not possible with existing materials by relaxing the rigidity of structure in previous solid building block approaches.

by Vincent Leclerc, Amanda Parkes and Professor Hiroshi Ishii of MIT’s Tangible Media Group