Moo00oo

Present: Today was a day where the Vuo and Isadora patches communicated with the Kinect line-in. Alex suggested it would be helpful to record live movement in the space as a way of later manipulating the settings, but after a solid 30 minutes of turning luminescence up and down and trying to eliminate the noise of the floor’s center reflection, we made a time-based decision that the amount of time I hoped to save by having a recording off of which I could work outside of the Motion Lab would be less than the amount of time it would take to establish a workable video. I moved on.

Oded kindly spiked the floor to demarcate the space which the (center ceiling) Kinect captures. This space turns out to be oblong: deeper upstage than wider right to left. The depth data of “blobs” (“objects or people in space – whatever is present) is taken in through Isadora (first via Vuo as a way of mediating Syphon). I had Alex/Oded in space walk around so that I could examine how Isadora measures their height and width, and enlisted an Inside Range actor to set the output so that whenever the width data rises above a certain number, it triggers … a mooing sound.

Which means: when people are moving within the demarcated space, if/when they touch each other, a “Mooo” erupts. It turns out it’s pretty funny. This also happens when people spread their arms wide in the space, as my data output allows for that size.

Future:
Designing the initial user-experience responsive to the data output I can now control: how to form the audience entrance into the space, and to create a projected film that guides them to – do partner dancing? A barn-cowyboy theme? In other words, how do I get my participants to touch, and to separate while staying within the dimensions of the Kinect sensor, and they touch by connecting right-to-left in the space (rather than aligning themselves upstage-downstage). Integrating the sound output of a cow lowing, and having a narrow and long space is getting me thinking on line dancing …