Fractals and Hand Tracking

My Process
For the past 2-3 weeks I have educating myself on creating Generative Art in Processing. I began doing research into what already exists and I came across a great book called Generative Art, A Practical Guide Using Processing. Many of the exercises in this book went into great detail into some important terms that we will definitely be using in our project. The translate() function is a great way to move the origin point (0,0,0)  for your sketch. This is helpful because you can make fractals that can be easily spaced out without having to calculate the parent fractals location plus the location of where you want the copies. I also learned that classes are the best way to keep organize in these sometimes lengthy sketches.

The Next Step
Once I had a good understanding of how to create fractals I went looking into how to make them interactive with a user on the kinect. I referenced a tutorial sketch that I had programmed that would utilize the kinect's skeletal tracking feature and I tweaked it to draw a red ellipse onto the user's right hand. I then pulled in a branch fractal and adjusted its update location to be connected with the location of the users hand. I ran the sketch and came to the realization that it was taking up a lot of processing power to draw what the kinect was viewing and the consistently changing branch fractal so I turned off the depth image it was drawing and I told Processing to find the pixels that coincided with the user and paint those green. That made the sketch run much more smoothly. Below is a snapshot of what the sketch looked like.

Installation size research

How much distance could we effectively use our tech in? 

Finding a balance between comfort for a group of users to experience our interactive floor with others, realistic size of fabricating the project and number of participants is a tough task. We want to let as many people as possible experience and play together, but we have to be mindful of how much room people need to stand around and be able to move their bodies. On the other hand, we also want people to feel like they are having fun together and don't want to give too much cushion between bodies. Finally, we have to realize that what we are building has to conform with the size of our lab and our budget so we can not build a studio with a stage.

Imagination can do so much, let's really see it!

As researched in our previous blog post Floor Size and Negative Space Research we have a good point of reference thanks to Dance Deck of Signature Systems Group, LLC. They are the world's largest center for renting dance floors and recommend a minimum of 4.5 square feet per person to have enough room on a dance floor. Considering this figure per person and combining it with the maximum effective distance of a X-Box Kinect which we will be using in our project we can make a good decision on the size of our floor plan.

These constraints have led us to choose a 100x100 foot square for the time being. Ideally this could populate 20 people. Unlike a traditional dance floor, our project will include display walls and a place for our performer (at this point, a DJ) to set up their materials. We have reserved a space for this which we have deemed 10 square feet, leaving 90 square feet for the participants which still equates to 20. For testing purposes we are choosing not to work in the ideal scope as we tread new waters. We are setting our maximum at 10 users until further notice and aiming for a minimum of 5 users for ideal conditions.

We want to be able to let users really go wild in our environment. Furthermore, we understand that there are limitations to the technologies we will be using during this project due to our budget restraints. All hope isn't lost friends so don't fret. Hopefully after user testing encountering the many unforeseen variables of this project we can involve more participants within this floor space, or expand our floor. Stay tuned fans! There are no instruction manuals here, just discoveries being made! #FBA!

Seeing is believing. It was crucial for us to see our floor plan in person before moving forward.