Wk 11: PComp Project 3 Ideation

I cooperate with Echo Tang on this project.

Background:

Our idea partly comes from our last project. Echo and I decided to extend our former project further, since time is limited but we want to refine it to a more professional extent. As my first semester is drawing to a close, I gradually realize that expressing an idea that I want to express is more significant than considering the technical part first. Therefore, this time when we brainstormed ideas, we tried to put aside the technology part and focus on the theme and content that we wished to convey.

In the last project, we interacted with projector, light, and immersive environment. The meditative ambiance we created eventually provoked a sense of emotional resonance amongst the audience. Those emotions are the private assets belonging to each independent, but to some degree, they echoed similarly to the scene, which is quite interesting to me. When we shared the ideas, the first thought that popped out of my mind is the time difference, time, and long-distance, which we are dealing with every day with various feelings. Our idea of this project is to create a story-based, time-themed interactive project with sound and light. 

Idea:

Within the time and time difference theme, we want to interact with the light and sound to tell a story about long-distance lovers.

The girl is in a long-distance relationship with the boy in a significant time zone difference – one is in Shanghai and the other is in New York. Every day, when the girl goes to bed and says “good night” to the boy, the boy is about to get up and greet with “good morning”. (This is just a small piece of the story.)

We want our audiences to experience these “a-synchronous” moments audibly through their whispers. We also want our audiences to feel the time difference and time flows visually through the transiting colors from orange (day) to blue (night). As the person moving from one end to the other end, the person will hear different whispers on different points in between and the color of the light will also change accordingly.

Sketch:

Some Inspirations:

We went through a lot of projects and videos related to light and the project Uber5 created by Elise Co gave me a lot inspiration on how to present the invisible time flow with visual elements.

https://vimeo.com/151711793

Red string of fate / Red Thread of Fate

According to the Japanese legend, this thread emanating from the heart doesn’t end at the tip of the finger. It continues in the form of an invisible red string, which ”flows” out of your pinkie and goes on to intertwine with the red strings of other people – connecting your heart with theirs.

Setup:

• Distance sensor/Gesture tracking sensor:
  We want to input the horizontal position of the person to control the color transitions of the LED Lights.

• LED lights/LED strip covered with diffusing materials:
  Our first idea was to use an LED stripe in version 1 to display the color transition when the person moving along. But later, we felt that displaying color transition through several independent LED lights might be more interesting. (not sure yet)

• Two speakers:
  We want to use these two speakers to play the audios collected from a real human.

• Projector and Canvas:
  We will sketch a minimalistic light following effect in P5 and project it on the canvas. We also consider showing some keywords on the canvas as the speakers play the audio. (not sure yet)

Feedbacks:

1. Use objects that are filled with memories to be the medium to show the color transition.
2. Collect intimate talk from a real couple and apply it to the audible output (playback).
3. Instead of playing daily life talks, we can play some poetic content to enhance the sense of art.
4. Let the LED strip to be a communication tunnel. Two people, standing on the two ends of the strip, talk to each other through it. According to the difference of the time, the rate of color transition changes.