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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“The Virtual Museum of Canada must unashamedly create compelling experiences and should experiment with game-like interfaces that are strongly content-based for the born-digital generations.”

This is one of the core conclusions of the Next Generation report (“experience design” chapter) on the future development of the popular Virtual Museum of Canada website.

“PlayWorks” is the title of a new permanent exhibition at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan aimed at children under 5.

“Beneath each image will be a second canvas, a textural and three-dimensional rendering, which a child can touch. And this installation will be just one in a series of interactive exhibits: a huge transparent wall whose surface is for fingerpainting; a climbing structure with hidden dioramas; a sand laboratory with buried “treasures”; a construction area for building gadgets; and, among many other displays, a mechanical baby dragon that will say words when children drop letters into its mouth. The exhibition’s emphasis is not the old saw that learning is fun, but that fun is learning.”

“The idea is that in moments of everyday play children are really getting a tremendous amount of education,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and an adviser to the project. “The significance of play as a foundation for learning is a critically important cultural message.”

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Very interesting post by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen on her blog HobbyPrincess on museums and web 2.0:

“Some time ago Virtueel Platform organized a workshop called Take Away Museum to discuss new emerging ways to engage people in conversations with exhibited artwork and artifacts. The central question was: what is Web 2.0 for museums?”

In general there seem to be four basic ways for organizing the relationship between an exhibited artifact and a museum visitor: reactive consumption, proactive consumption, private production and public production.

“The transformation of museum visits from reactive consumption to public production is dramatic, and many museums still seem to consider how far they could and should go without risking museums as professional institutions of cultural and material history.”

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“>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)

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)

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)

In the Papalote Museo del Niño (a kids tangible museum in Mexico city), there is a Digital Dome that plays music for your eyes.

Aleph is an experimental public display, that is using the spaces, people and objects it faces as a palette to display messages from hidden viewpoints. When looking at a small mirror, it reflects a fraction of the space around us, when looking at a mirror façade, it reflects most things around us, containing segments that are dark or bright, red or green.

But if we build a matrix of small mirrors, which can adjust their tilt according to the site they are facing, we can create a display that uses the ever changing flux of the place to show images from certain points in space. It will not be comprehendable from all viewpoints, just from specific ones, asking visitors to explore the space, or providing surprising flashes in a public setup that can stay around the edge of comprehension.

Project by Adam Somlai-Fischer, 2005

(via Interactive Architecture)

The Hidden Worlds of Noise and Voice is an interactive audiovisual installation, or, alternatively, an augmented-reality speech-visualisation system.

It has been developed by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman in collaboration with the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria.

Its central theme is the magical relationship of speech to the ethereal medium which conveys it.

Participants in Hidden Worlds are able to “see” each others’ voices, which are made visible in the form of animated graphic figurations that appear to emerge from the participants’ mouths while they speak. In the installation, visitors wear special see-through data glasses, which register and superimpose 3D graphics into the real world. When one of the users speaks or sings, colorful abstract forms appear to emerge from his or her mouth. The graphics representing these utterances assume a wide variety of shapes and behaviors that are tightly coupled to the unique qualities of the vocalist’s volume, pitch and timbre.

(via Interactive Architecture)

With Invisible – The Shadow Chaser, players have to sense and capture “ghosts” with a vacuum cleaner. “Invisible” goblins sneak around, but you can only see their shadows.
The system, developed by the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, allows “hunters” to feel the presence of 3D virtual objects using only indirect information such as the shadows and sounds of goblins instead of direct images.

When the goblins move, players can hear their footsteps. The volume of the sound changes depending on the goblins’ position on the floor. When players capture goblins, they hear the goblins’ scream and vacuuming sounds.

Players can also get a haptic sense of capture. When they catch a goblin, small motors in the hose of the device vibrate sequentially from the nozzle toward the handle. Then a large vibrating motor in the backpack presents a sense that the captured goblin is struggling. At the same time, water is moved from a tank on the ground to another in the backpack, so players feel the weight of the captured goblins.

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