A Flash In The Pan
Dec 2015, New York
Interactive Installation, Digital Visual, Fabrication
Group Work
A Flash in the Pan is an interactive installation, which conveys the idea of infinite and transformed life. The idea of the project generated from Chinese ancient myth, that when people died, his life will be transfer to various forms, the shooting star, the blooming flower or even the silent stone, since that life will last forever.
Audience use their hand gestures to explore and trigger various effects, grabbing shooting stars, blooming flowers and even evoking stone statues. Through exploring more it can help the audience deep focusing and meditation.
Exhibition
December 2015, ITP Winter Show, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, New York, U.S
Group Members
Yiting Liu
My Contributions
Ideation
Digital Fabrication
Design Tools
Processing
Leap Motion
Arduino, CNC, Laser Cut
Ideation
Life is vulnerable and short, like a flash in the pan, the meteor shot across the sky. However there is a tale said that every star is a loss of life. If we think that the loss of life will be transformed to the star in the sky, the flower in the spring, the raindrop in the summer or the leaves of the autumn. Then, life will be infinite and be more powerful.
So, we came up with the idea that using the stars as the symbol of vitality to evoke other forms of life. We want to convey the idea that life is short like the flash in the pan, but it is also infinite since it could be transformed and last forever.
Diagram
The Project consists of two main parts, the visual effects on the screen and the physical devices. To clarify, in the virtual world, when gamers use the pinch gesture to grab a shooting star and put it on the tree, the flowers will blossomed. For the physical installation, when gamers drag the star to the stone statues in the virtual world, the statues in the physical world will be evoked in forms of lighting up or grow a paper flower.
My Contribution
I took charge of making the physical computing parts, including designing the interactive installations and building the serial communication between the physical parts and the virtual parts.
See codes from here
User Testing
