Peter’s Popping Pressure Project (1)

For my first pressure project, I wanted to explore a sort of gameified concept.  This project has two main components to it – popping digital bubbles by moving within their volume (this component is shown in the attached video – sorry it’s sideways!), and experiencing yourself via a third-person perspective (not in the video, but experienced in class).

My inspiration for the latter aspect of the experience came from staying up until 5am one night whilst demonstrating VR to friends from my dorm.  We ended up streaming local video calls into the head mounted display, and were able to watch ourselves walk through the environment from a fixed perspective.  I found it profound how quickly my mind associated with my third-person self and how different the experience is when navigating a space in such a way.  I wanted to use that idea and make it accessible to everyone, so my solution was to have the computer’s camera at a different location from that of the screen, and encourage the users to conceptualize fine motor skills from this new perspective.

And that leads into the former means of interaction – popping bubbles.  The bubbles both function as an encouragement to move about the space, as well as a curiosity to learn how we as participants can effect them.  Their mechanic is they spawn in at random locations on the screen (faster if there is no motion in the environment), and the bubbles will pop once a user collides with a bubble (as seen from the camera’s perspective).  To add curiosity and engage more senses, I caused the bubbles to play a MIDI sound each time they are popped, whose pitch is determined by the total motion within the camera’s field of view.

This system was achieved through clipping the incoming video signals into small portions, then dividing them apart into a 10 x 10 array.  That array then detects motion within each 1 x 1 grid component, and will pop a bubble if there is enough motion and a bubble is present in that coordinate.

It was very enjoyable to observe everyone interact with this system; similar to how we stepped back and observed the workings of our “Conwy’s Game of Life” experience in the Motion Lab, taking the time to simply observe the users instead of their associated video makes the experience truly feel performative.  The rules set forth by this patch caused users to move delicately as well as chaotically, in attempts to discover what the system’s rules are.  I found it interesting that many users did not associate the popping of bubbles with their movements, as well associate the playing of audio when bubbles are popped, until 2 – 4 minutes into the experience (however seeing as I was the one who designed the system, I was quite blind to how it would look for a first-timer).  Overall this project was very fun, and I enjoy seeing how everyone interacted with these different systems!

pp1 <– Isadora patch