Its that time of year again for Newcastle & Gateshead to host a schedule of winter festive activities one of which is Enchanted Parks 2011, a winter walk light trail with light art from a wide selection of artists and designers. This year as part of Filament a creative company I am part of along with Steve Holmes, Neil Colebeck & Dan Addams we have been asked to be part of Enchanted parks 2011 with a design of our own. Last year we presented lighting in Saltwell-park-dene where visitors could interact with he lighting through a series of control on the bridge overlooking the installation, Mr Holmes done a grad job of the interaction programming between the controls and the lighting now this year its my responsibility to do the pre programming whilst Steve is away jet-setting on site visits to Miami and Florida. The idea for the installation was conceived a couple of months back which was the easy part, putting it into practice was another challenge all together, between us we came up with the idea of an interactive piece where visitors were presented with a set of buttons on brightly lit plinths overlooking part of the park. When one of the buttons was pushed part of a song plays, when another of the buttons is pressed another part of the same xmas themed song plays (chosen and edited by Dan).
One of the buttons, it doesn’t look like much yet!
For each button push and song segment a light show is triggered designed and programmed by Neil, the kicker comes when each of the four buttons are pressed in the correct order a bigger song and much larger “Wow factor” light-show is triggered as a reward for ‘Breaking the code’. We meet this weekend prior to the full park install on monday to fit up the rig and see if there is anything we have missed to make this work. I have programmed the interaction using vvvv taking care of the logic of the button pushes, light triggering and sound playback, it had been a while since I used vvvv but in still never ceases to amaze me how good it is for creative applications!
vvvv discretely handling the clever stuff!
There were allot of interaction problems, re-triggers and feedback loops to overcome whilst programming the patch for this which was addictive’ly challenging and much much trickier than appears on the surface. Now, after spending several hours of tweaking and streamlining the playback and interactivity seems to work a treat.
Current Buttons Schematic, beauty in simplicity.
So thats in in a nutshell, if you have read this and I have given the game away then you must have been searching pretty hard to find this post so well done. As I type this I’m chatting to Steve whilst he waits in San Francisco to come come to the delightful weather of Newcastle in December, remember your jeggings Steve.
Also, this little guy has been helping out within Filament too 😉
