Camille Utterback
and Romy Achituv,
United States,
1999
Text Rain
02
attraction
Create a motion play area where viewer can apply movement to view themselves in the wall projecting
affordance
The viewer's senses expand in the media space through motion play
Engaging viewers in the media space with a game method
affects
By tracking the position, movement, and stopping of the viewer through cameras and sensors, and detecting the appearance of the viewer, the images and characters falling along the body outline are displayed on the screen
feedback
Sensor, Kinetic Camera
input
output
Screen (Projector)
Physical movement
viewer bahaviour
how does it work?
The audience will be projected on the screen in black and white like a mirror through video projection, but if the synthesized characters on it stop due to the audience silhouette or else being darker than the limit, you can put it in or raise it. The characters will fall again whenever the dark shadow disappears. In this way, the viewer interacts with his or her physical movements to construct characters that do not actually exist.
The ability to track a person's movements and determine what gestures they may be performing can be achieved through various tools. The kinetic user interfaces (KUIs) are an emerging type of user interface that allow users to interact with computing devices through the motion of objects and bodies. Examples of KUIs include tangible user interfaces and motion-aware games such as Wii and Microsoft's Kinect, and other interactive projects.
Although there is a large amount of research done in image/video based gesture recognition, there is some variation within the tools and environments used between implementations.
Another example of this is mouse gesture trackings, where the motion of the mouse is correlated to a symbol being drawn by a person's hand which can study changes in acceleration over time to represent gestures.
A standard 2D camera can be used for gesture recognition where the resources/environment would not be convenient for other forms of image-based recognition. Earlier it was thought that single camera may not be as effective as stereo or depth aware cameras, but some companies are challenging this theory. Software-based gesture recognition technology using a standard 2D camera that can detect robust hand gestures.
Kinetic Camera
Working in collaboration with Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback, Text Rain, released in 1999. Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in the field of digital and interactive art. Her works explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to the human movement and physicality in visually layered ways. This is an interactive installation that responds to an audience’s behaviour in which the characters falling like rain on the screen are reflected on the camera. The audience may flow the characters displayed on the screen, create a fragmentary text, and enjoy the interaction with others displayed on the screen. This work creates a relationship between letters and movements is based on experimenting with the nature of language and space.
“Text Rain” is a representative installation work example of a work that uses characters as a medium in interactive media art. A letter is a symbol of language by beginning with visual recognition and reaching mutual meaning and understanding, and sentences are represented by letters. The text in the work is transmitted through the screen projected by the projector, and the viewer interacts with his or her own image to express the writer’s verbal message. These letters are not random, but the part of poems appear in the squadron and generally do not read well when settled on the body of the audience. It emphasizes the communication aspects from the functional point of view through the encoding and decoding processes, allowing visitors to combine new words or create naturally formed words through physical interactions.
