a Squidsoup project
Glowing Pathfinder Bugs, an interactive art project primarily aimed at children, uses projection to visualise virtual bugs on a real sandpit. The bugs are aware of their surroundings and respond to its form in their vicinity. By changing the shapes and forms in the sand, the bugs’ environment is altered in real time, creating a direct form of communication between virtual bugs and real people.
This highly malleable and tactile physical environment allows us define and carve out landscapes in which the creatures exist, in real time. The piece, originally commisioned by Folly Gallery for Portable Pixel Playground, encourages a simple form of animal husbandry; a sense of looking after, controlling, breeding and caring for the bugs.
Glowing Pathfinder Bugs resulted from a period of research and experimentation into interaction in three physical dimensions. It uses equipment originally designed to track human gestures and movement, and as with much of our work, we try to blur or dissolve the boundaries between the real world and virtual space.
In this piece virtual creatures are controlled by, and appear in, a physical landscape. As the bug’s decisions are based on their surroundings, and this is controlled by participants, there is a strong sense of communication between bugs and people - virtul and real.
Squidsoup is a digital arts group specialising in immersive interactive installations within physical 3D space. Their work combines sound, light, physical space and virtual worlds to produce immersive and emotive headspaces. They explore the modes and effects of interactivity, looking to make digital experiences where meaningful and creative interaction can occur.
Contributors: Anthony Rowe, Chris Bennewith, Liam Birtles.
NetChimes is a collection of wind actuated instruments, distributed throughout the Earth, which are capable of sending and receiving state information via OSC (the Open Sound Control protocal) over wide area networks. As individual chimes are struck locally (according to wind conditions, the action is reported to the network and repeated on a similar (mirror) set of chimes at a remote location. Similarly, wind-actuated activity at the remote chime set is received/recreated at the local end. Some This basic two-way interaction will be expanded as the number of participating chime sets grow, resulting in a larger network chime mesh (the meshwork). At the center of this meshwork is a single set of mother chimes, a much larger instrument mirroring the action of the entire network at one location.