My last project of the semes­ter was a response to the con­cept of ges­ture. This is my second-ever installation-ish piece, and it was well-received. When some­one moves in front of the cam­era, the motion is detected and rep­re­sented on-screen as the spin­ning of hun­dreds of tiny discs. Faster motion makes the discs spin faster and change color more rapidly. The effect is even more inter­est­ing when using a pro­jec­tor to cover a whole wall with the spin­ning discs.

From watch­ing peo­ple inter­act with this piece, I learned that every­body loves to see their actions inter­preted and expressed in an alter­nate form. Although I find this project visu­ally inter­est­ing, I was con­cerned about the fact that it doesn’t com­mu­ni­cate any explicit infor­ma­tion. That turned out not to be a prob­lem from the user’s per­spec­tive, as every­one I’ve shown it to imme­di­ately starts wav­ing their hands around, jump­ing up and down, and mak­ing all sorts of strange motions, becom­ing entranced by the pat­terns that “they” are cre­at­ing on the screen.

After a cou­ple min­utes, though, the col­ors become such a hodge­podge that they cease to exhibit inter­est­ing pat­terns. So, fol­low­ing one of the great pieces of feed­back I received, I added a timer that resets the grid once a minute. That reset encour­ages fur­ther exper­i­men­ta­tion and allows peo­ple to “take turns.” Users seem to get more invested in their motive exper­i­men­ta­tions when they can claim full own­er­ship of the visual result, as tran­sient as it is.

Watch a video here: