Along came Romanian Design Week, so something was bound to jump out of my sketchbook and have a quick furtive flirt with reality. Luckily, my friends at Simbio were hosting an event, and they wanted to accompany it with a performance piece of art.
Meanwhile at the Magnolia Scarves atelier, we were working on a delicate piece of new design: the Butterfly-Veil.
As soon as the first of our little friends started flapping its wings, awesomeness ensued quite rapidly:
It wasn’t until long that an idea came about, based on an old motif that my dad had reminded me about, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One hundred years of solitude”: the boy constantly followed by a swarm of yellow butterflies.
“It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia. […] She had thought for an instant that the miracle was going to be repeated with her daughter, because she had been bothered by a sudden flapping of wings. It was the butterflies. (14.23)”
So the setup was this: in the space of the Simbio exhibition, with the help of my friends Virgil Ilian and Sebastian Comanescu, I’ve set up a Kinect sensor, my laptop and my trusty old BenQ short-throw projector. The “short-throw” part is important, because one beemer was enough to fill up the whole attic roof, without the need for stitching or projection mapping. That was the easy part.
Now, the Kinect (using OpenNI processing drivers) was able to sense people waking about the attic, pinpointing their position in space and creating a point cloud. Those points were fed into the “butterfly-engine”, making the swarm of delicate beauties follow you around, especially if you happened to raise your arms. Here’s the small-scale proof-of-concept:
Doing that provided the Kinect with more points at your location (the higher, the “heavier” as an attractor for the butterflies) and made them come to you. Some would alternate raising their arms, to play ping pong with the swarm. Others puffed up to reach as high as possible, and get all the butterflies to themselves.
Children quickly caught on to the idea and made their parents carry them on their backs, to “get more butterflies (!!!)”. That really made my day, month and year.
Design is Bravery 