Their task was to design and implement the installation: formulate the visual design and the interaction design, in concert with software and hardware solutions that would support it.

From a wider range of ideas they came up with, the University of Dayton chose the concept of a field of cubes which animate in various ways, and, when someone is present in front of them, come together to form ‘screens’ with videos. This procedural animation, as well as the computer vision application that provided the interactive input, was built with an open source coding platform openFrameworks.

The videos in the installation were directed by Peter Rhoads, and produced, as was the entire project, by Hush.

Visual Language

Their basic element, the cube, a great mechanism for revealing the videos, was now a starting point for explorations of the visual design that would make the cubes more than ‘just cubes’, and that would resemble the visual language of UD, especially the flat rectangular shapes of the Dayton banners. they experimented with ways of rendering the cubes to abstract them to their basic geometric shapes. They ended up using orthographic camera, no lighting, and frequently rendering one of the faces of the cubes with the same color as the background.

They then added a color shader. Each face of each cube is rendered with a single color, but this color changes depending on the faces’s angle to the camera. The color is picked from pre-designed image gradient that constitutes a palette. There are several palettes that change frequently. The palettes not only change the color of the cubes, but also how much they are abstracted — how much become part of with the background, creating a further variation in the designs of the shapes in the pattern.

Altogether, the entire field of cubes, with how they overlap and with the negative-space shapes formed between the cubes, had a potential to create a variety of looks and patterns that could be perceived as flat 2d imagery or as 3d objects. This gave it the quality of something more structural and dimensional that could ‘open up’, rather than just being on the surface of the wall.

The field of cubes is animated with waves of activity. The effects they apply to the cubes are grouped together to create many specific different looks. Within their group however, the effects are picked randomly, resulting in patterns which, while staying withing the general aesthetic boundaries they created, vary in the specifics.

The circles in the above ‘debug’ view of the application are what they call Affectors. Invisible in normal mode, they travel randomly on the wall and each of them rotates, moves or scales the cubes that it passes over. Several of those Affectors combined together can produce very interesting kinds of effects.

The Affectors start small and grow to their final size as they travel around. The longer the cube has been under the effect of the Affector, the more it is influenced by it.
Most of the time a lot of Affectors act on the cubes simultaneously, and they get fairly large, as in the image below.

They put together sets of those Affectors that they thought looked good together, creating a specific kind of pattern. Within each set the animation is subtle, and fairly low-key. The change between the Affector Sets is much more dramatic. It is triggered by interactive events — such as when someone enters the interaction area, and also periodically after some time has passed. The change in the Affector Set is accompanied by a change in palette. Both the sets and the palettes are picked randomly, creating more variation and unique looks.

Interaction Design

The interaction is very intuitive: simply, a person’s presence elicits the response of the system, not requiring an intentional interaction. The gestural interaction was designed based on their previous experience using the Kinect cameras. At Dayton, 4 of the Kinects, embedded in the ceiling in front of the wall provide information about the viewer’s presence and movement. The contour of the person seen by the overhead cameras is mapped onto the field of cubes. Three large areas on the wall are regions where the videos can be revealed. The cubes falling within the person contour and the video region fade in their video tile as they scale, rotate and move to congeal with other cubes forming the video.

One of the most complicated aspects of the application was transition from the inherent behavior of the cubes to the behaviors that were tied to revealing the video and responding to the person’s presence. While each cube needed to respond immediately to the person, it still needed to retain some of the animation that it would have otherwise, creating a smooth transition: a video reveal that would remain in the style of the pattern of the graphics that was currently being ‘performed’ by the cubes. They also wanted the rectangle of the video never to have a straight edge, to always be influenced by the waves of activity passing through the field of cubes.

In the images above you can also see their simulator of the interaction — an app that communicates with their main application with the same kind of information about the position and contour of the person as the real tracker application sends.

When a person enters the interaction area, they send a wave through the field of cubes, a kind of ‘hello’ from the system, a gesture of recognition and acknowledgment that each viewer has an impact on the entire system.

The cubes that are not in the video revealing regions, but are within the area affected by the viewer assume a different behavior than all the other cubes.  This way the viewer leaves a trace as they move through the cubes, and their every move is immediately reflected in the patterns they see in front of them.

When nobody is present in the interaction area the installation will go into ‘Idle Mode’. In this mode the graphics continue with their waves of activity, and on top of them typography animates on, forming questions that UD would like their students to ponder. The palettes and the behavior of the cubes change slightly to accommodate the legibility of the type.

Client: University of Dayton
Agency: 160over90
Production Company: HUSH
Art & Technology Director: Flightphase

FLightphase credits:
Creative Direction, Interaction Design, Bespoke Software Design

Creative Direction/Design: Karolina Sobecka
Technical Direction: James George, Jeff Crouse
Lead Sofware Development: Jeff Crouse
Additional Software Development: Caleb Johnston

Together they create something vast, wonderful and entirely new. A Storyverse. A place where details touch, overlap and lead you further. To new music to listen to. New movies to watch. Places to visit. People to know. And of course, new books to read. Getting started is simple. Just choose a book. See where it takes you.

Learn more here.

What is it?

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According to its teaser video above, OutListen will be a “user-generated media database for live concerts and events catering mainly but not exclusively to performing musical groups … [and it is] designed to be the place where live music lives on the internet, where lovers of performers can view, share and combine their own personal concert footage all in one place.”

To promote their latest tracks, BlueBrain, a Washington, DC-based music group comprising two brothers, launched a series of iPhone apps that play the band’s latest tracks according to the geographic location of its listeners in Manhattan and Washington. Their first release, The National Mall app, offers location-specific music to users in the Mall, a park in downtown Washington, and their second location-aware album, Listen to the Light, is designed for listeners in New York’s Central Park.

“Hundreds of zones within the Mall are tagged and alter the sound based on where the listener is located in proximity to them,” the BlueBrain blog explains. “Zones overlap and interact in dynamic ways that, while far from random, will yield a unique experience with each listen. The proprietary design that is the engine behind the app will stay hidden from view as the melodies, rhythms, instrumentation and pace of the music vary based on the listeners’ chosen path.”

The following video, Music for Landscapes, shows how BlueBrain created their second interactive, location-aware album, Listen to the Light, and serves as a mini documentary on the production process.

Want to learn even more about BLUEBRAIN? Check out the backstory behind Hays and Ryan Holladay’s innovative music concept in the TEDx Talk by Ryan below.

But does democratized culture mean better art, film, music and literature or is true talent instead flooded and drowned in the vast digital ocean of mass culture? Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity?

This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.