Cycle 2 – Seasons – Min Liu
Posted: April 9, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For this cycle, I wanted to create interactive virtual environments that contribute to embodied learning. I chose Seasons as the theme of this project. Participants can interact with nature things in specific seasons using their bodies. For example, spring & flowers, summer & rain, autumn & falling leaves, winter & snow.
I worked with Touchdesigner this time since Isadora was not friendly to what I wanted to do. I used webcam as the input device. In Touchdesigner, the NVbackground actor can remove the background and the Optical flow actor can track body movements. By ParticleGup, different kind of interactive particles can be created. Since I was not familiar with Touchdesign, I spent a long time figuring out how to transit from one scene to another in time order which is very easy to realize in Isadora. In this cycle, I only created the autumn and winter scenes. I am still learning about other interactive visual effects using different body languages, and how to trigger sound by movements in Touchdesigner. This is the Touchdesigner patch:
I was excited to install it in the motion lab. To avoid shadow, Oded told me that I could project the image onto the back of the screen, and people stand in front of the screen to interact with virtual environments. It’s magical to me seeing both digital figures and human shadows reflected on the curtain from people standing before and behind the curtain.
Participants were happy to interact with snows and leaves. But due to the limitation of the webcam, they must stand in a specific area, or they were out of the screen. I will try Kinect next time to see if I can solve the problem. I also learned that lighting is important because it decides the quality of the real time input video.
Shadrick gave me some nice advice to further develop this learning system. First, I can add some fun filters to digital figures, like wearing them hats in winter. Second, different countries have different climates characteristics. I can build environments based on different regions. For the next cycle, I will also combine media-enhanced objects and environments together.
Here is the recording of the experience: