PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
The brain’s visual cortex is responsible for processing all visual information we see with our eyes, sorting colour, shape, depth, position, and speed into usable signals, and reconstructs this data into images in our imagination.
My little depth camera does the same thing, sending RGB, depth, and infrared data to my computer to process.
Watch us simulate the inside of my brain, using the camera’s colour and depth data to generate live interactive animations.
My computer will watch you back, and dream new ways of seeing you in the world. The camera in the installation will track participants, and a series of interactive live videos will be generated in the space based on their presence and actions.
Join my computer and me for a fun evening in my over-stimulated visual cortex.
TYLER'S NOTES:
This installation was a fun one-off event with my pals at Emmedia and Beakerhead, installed in the top floor of Calgary's historic Central Memorial Library, in the offices of WordFest. What a blast! We were mobbed by people for the entire evening, a rousing success!
This project was another experiment in my motion-capture in performance trajectory. I was prototyping a new way (for me) of using a Kinect depth camera to capture real-time human movement, but this time using TouchDesigner as the software handling everything. So I created two "looks" feeding from the same camera input, tracking a human body "blob" and translating it into two different, but technically similar, compositions. Sort of a left-brain/right-brain concept.
There were some additional eyeballs that tracked the user across the dance floor. The speed of the music was synced to the position of the first user's hands, so as they raised or lowered their arms, the ambient score would speed up, or slow down. People got the hang of it very quickly.
Some astronauts and robots also came by to break-dance in front of the installation!
I expanded upon this technique for my projection designs for the second production of Premium Content, a theatrical show that went up at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary a few months later.
