Crafting Interactive Spaces

Finally I’ve found some time to write about project did just before Christmas break during Crafting Intarctive Spaces course. This time we were supervised by Joshua Walton and James Tichenor from The Rockwell Group Lab. The course started by visiting SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. We visited this hotel to look for inspiration and places that we can use as a target of our ideas during this course.

Because in this course I wanted to play with infrared (IR) cameras after one or two days of concept development I decided to work with lounge space of the hotel. Exactly the windows between lounge and street. The idea was to create an interactive surface on the window that people passing by can play with.

I’ve found a big window perfect for my project quite quickly. It was a empty room in our building at DKDS.

First step was to decide where to place the camera. I needed a camera to detect position and distance of a visitor. I tried to mount in above the window but it was quite difficult and it turned out that area covered by camera was to small to be useful. I postponed thinking about the camera and focused on projection. Because is not possible to project on a clear glass I had to cover the window with something. From my past experience I had known that tracing paper (90-95gr) is quite good for this kind of stuff. I also tried cheaper baking paper but it’s quality wasn’t good enough. To stick paper to the window I used small square pieces of paper tape that in the end created surpassingly good effect.

In the dark, projection on this surface looked very good.

After setting the projection I started playing with camera once again. I decided that I want to place both camera and projection inside the room so there was nothing on the visitor’s side. The only thing I needed before doing first camera test was a source of infrared light. I used an regular desk lamp with piece of infrared filter in front of it. Here is a screenshot of IR camera footage:

I’ve used a Gruppy (F-038) camera I borrowed from Josh and James. So my final setup looked like this:

You can see small camera and projector attached to a table and the lamp with filter on the left. Because I used only small part of the window, the second half that was still covered was perfect to display debug information in my software.

It was already late and only one day left before final show but I hadn’t any software yet. I already played with openframeworks previous day so I quickly developed a very simple application. When a person approach the window and is close enough, it starts reflecting IR light that was emitted by the lamp in the room. Because tracing paper diffuses every light (even IR) you have to be very close to the surface. Otherwise IR camera can’t capture anything. So the idea was to simply light up the whole window when you are staying next to it. Results were AMAZING and beautiful! Here is Josh playing with it:

[Update 2009-02-05]

Josh and James have written a bit about the workshop on their website : CIID Workshop.