rough animatic of online interaction

Here a rough animatic showing how upload photos will be dislayed. Also shown is the route that a user would take to upload there own image.

Interactive installation concept

My concept as it stands now is a web site where a user can upload an image of their surrounding. The user is then asked to  add attributes to the image. This image is then sorted along with the attributes the users has selected.

A program  then sorts the images by the attributes the users have given. Images with similar attributes are put into sequences which are projected in a physical environment accompanied with an audio recording which shares similar attributes as the images. 

At Show and Tell last week I was given some very useful feed back which will help complete the circle of interaction (on-line users interaction generates  physical user interaction which creates more on-line interaction). The idea was to create a twitter style comment box which allows users of the physical installation to leave comments on images being projected. these comments can then be viewed by the on-line users.

Another piece of feed back I was given was to change the attributes from physically elements (location, time etc.) to human emotional elements (sadness, joy etc..). The installation would then project sequences of images relating to certain emotions. Robin also commented that these images could be geo-tagged allowing the possibly of a map of emotion of Scotland or world wide (the map would show where people arPublish Poste most happiest, stressed etc..). 

sketchbook - mind maps

Here are the sketches I created when I was trying to figure out the direction my project was heading in. There are also maps of interactive artist that I produce during research and the joining down of ideas, aims and objectives etc. (sorry for the poor layout of the images, blogspot was not agreeing with me today)

Interactive music videos

So after looking at The Wilderness Downtown interactive web video I did a little looking at what other interactive music video are out there. All of the video I found used very simple forms of interaction, mainly playing different video clips depending where the user clicks or animation which follows the users cursors. Nope of these videos really brought anything new to interactivity and didn't really change much or gain a higher purposefulness though there interaction.  

These three interactive videos are all pretty much the same as they all use animation which follows the users cursor.

Broken Bells - October

  Placebo-The Never Ending Why

Labuat- Soytuaire

Pendulum and professor Green both use 360 cameras in their videos, the user can rotate the the view of the camera as the video plays.

 Pendulum-360

 Professor Green-Coming To Get Me

The next  videos all play different video clicks depending on where the user clicks. 

Shihad -Sleep Eater 

Cold War Kids - I've Seen Enough 

Andy Grammer-Keep Your Head Up

http://theneverendingwhy.placeboworld.co.uk/http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

The Wilderness Downtown

The wilderness Downtown is an interactive music video for Arcade fire's song "We Used To Wait" from their lastest album the suburbs. The interactive video was created by director Chirs Milk and Google Creative Lab Technology Lead Aaron Koblin. The music video was bulid using HTML5 using Google Maps and Street-view for Google Chrome Experimens. 
So how is the music video Interactive? The users is prompted to input an address where they grew up. This address is used to created vissuals from Google Maps and Street-view. these vissuals are used in the video putting the user at the centre of the film narrative which portriats the user running though the streets of their town back to there home address. To complete the interactive experience the user creates an interactive postcard which potentially could be used as a visual for the North America tour. The postcard is alos entre into the Wilderness Machine which prints the postcards onto seed-embedded card (when planted a tree will grow from the card).
Creating an interactive video where the user becomes a centre part of the narrative by using simple interaction and common programs (Google maps and Street-view) is very clever But the part I most enjoyed the most and which i felt was the most interactive was the postcard. I enjoy creating the postcard which is a digital artifact but knowing that once it is entered into the Wilderness Machine has the possiblely to become something solid, physcal and a alife.
The big problem with this interactive video is that its very processor heavy. Using any brower apart Google Chrome on well spec computer results in the video become stuttery. Another problem which reduced the viewing experanice was that the video created alot of windows which pop up in beat with the music (showing different parts of the video). These windows popping up reminded me of pop up ads and i had to frigth the urge to close them all.


Here is  the Interactive video site: www.thewildernessdowntown.com
and heres a behind the work interview on creativiy-online.com (Click Here)

Xbox Kinect - Interactive installation input decive?

The new Xbox Kinect controller was recently launched this year. It sells for around £130 and allows Xbox players to use their full body as a controller without the need to hold any controller or wearing any sensors. There is three main functions the Kinect performs: Movement tracking, voice recognition and a motor which allows it rotate the main body up and down. T3 has an article on the website which explaines how Kinect works. Click here for the Movement tracking, Here for the voice recognition and here for the motor.

What I find interesting about the Xbox Kinect is that it can be used as a very cheap input device for an interactive installation. With the relative short amount of time it has taken some indulives to hack the Kinect (and program it to perfroum tasks) it cant be long before it is adpted for an interactive installation. I can’t really think of any example right now of how it could be used in aninteractive installation but maybe something like Golan Levin’s Interstitial Fragment Processor where the participants body forums the input to the installation.  

Below: just found this video of Theo Waston using the Kinect as an input device for an interactive puppet prototype, can't wait to see more developments of hacked kinects as an input device for art installations