omnispace

James Carpenter

Dey St. Tunnel by James Carpenter Design
The Dey Street Tunnel is a pedestrian tunnel that connects Fulton Street with the World Trade Center subway stations. For this project, a design by James Carpenter Design investigated several interactive solutions for LEDs in a space without natural light. The physical space animates as people walk through the tunnel at different rates, at different densities and from different directions. The LED lighting is integrated into only one wall of the tunnel through apertures in the polished stainless steel walls. The other walls, a combination of highly reflective and matt surfaces, create an illusion of multiple spaces and depths inside them.

Ada The Intelligent Room

Ada The Intelligent Room
created by Institute of Neuroinformatics
Ada is a novel artificial organism, a creature in the shape of a space that can perceive and react to its surroundings. At the same time, her form facilitates a novel interaction between humans and machine that goes beyond the possibilities offered by a conventional computer, such as keyboard, mouse or joystick. Ada has sensory organs. She can see, hear and sense touch and contact. While Ada cannot communicate with words, she expresses herself through sounds, light and projections. Ada likewise learns how to synchronise her various components, such as the floor plates, the movable eyes and the light fingers. Ada is able to remember the visitors with whom she has played and whose gestures, movements and sounds she has observed. Like humans, Ada learns from experience: she can store an incident and later build upon it. Ada can furthermore link various pieces of information and draw conclusions from this. Upon observing two individuals standing close together for a long period of time, she concludes that they are a pair.

Music for Bodies

Music for Bodies is a research project linking the sonic mapping of human bodies to architecture, through a practical study of bioresonance and interface building. Its aim is to discover new methods of experimental music making, as well as make new music more accessible to the wider community. It is doing this concentrating on making music to feel rather than just listen to. Currently it is making Sonic Beds around the world; it recently won an Award of Distinction for Digital Music at Prix Ars Electronica

Multi-touch Interaction

Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates for the first time publicly his intuitive, "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.

Nokia NYC

Interactive Interiors

Motion Wall was created by Nanika for the Interactive Interiors Exhibition at the newly opened Beyes store in Omotesando Hills shopping mall in Tokyo. It uses the motion in front of the screen to generate a never ending swirl of colors, letting visitors participate or simply enjoy what is created by the motion of passers-by.

Open Burble

In Open Burble by Usman Haque, a crowd of participants designs and constructs a "burble" that rises towards the sky like a plume of smoke. The project came about because we wanted to find a way to use the technology developed for Sky Ear in a more intuitive way that enables people to engage directly with the tactile experience of flying the cloud. Participants will divide into groups in order to assemble about 140 hexagonal "clouds" into a complete Burble, built to such a scale that, when inflated with helium, it will soar upwards like Jack's beanstalk. Just as the participants are the generators of the Burble's 60m tall form, so too are they the ones to control it. They hold on to it using handles with which they may position the Burble as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line - the form is a combination of the crowd's desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble.

BrainMirror

BrainMirror is an interactive experience by Aether Architecture where the image of the visitors brain appears mixed with his/her mirror image, using natural head movement as an interface to explore volumetric visuals of the human brain. Designed and built by 3 independent artist and technologist they've built an interface that works within a minimal learning curve for all age groups.

Second Skin

Second Skin by Marcos Lutyens uses hypnosis and genetic algorithms to extract and process embedded mental information to build a new approach to architecture. The field of study relating to Bose-Einstein condensates, and the influence of quantum issues on the understanding of consciousness are particularly pertinent to this exploration of 'mass mind'. Volunteers listen to a hypnotic induction which extracts conceptions of 'dwelling' from the unconscious. The volunteers are instructed to render their visualizations in a state of trance. Each volunteer is subsequently interviewed in order to extract additional information. The resulting models are inputted into their patented genetic algorithm program. These models provide with traits from which they are developing their grammar of emergent architecture.

Reactive Cube

The Reactive Cube, by Graham Plumb, is an acrylic cube filled with water and light. It was designed to transform digital images into apparently physical objects. A 2D image is projected through a mass of water mixed with a specially formulated emulsion of oil. The light is captured by the oil and appears to become a real object. Each version of the series is based on a particular form of interaction. Some cubes are reactive to sound, another to gesture, to the breath of someone from the audience, etc.