Sonny Yan
Time Machine
Project Type: Individual Project
Time: December, 2020
An interactive installation that allows the audience to have the experience of controlling the time.
For conceptual development, I have one inspiration called Docomo Palette UI. It uses a phone as the interactive device for the audience to play with the project. By scrolling up and down the screen, the audience can emit or retrieve objects like fumes, paper butterflies, ribbons, letters and Tetris. Companied by the specific sound effect, it provides the audience with the experience of scrolling a timeline to observe how objects evolve.
To represent the change of time, I used the rising and setting of the sun and moon, as well as the variation of the brightness in the background color. The object that changes with time is a tree, which would be randomly recursive and gives different audience different shapes. In the continuous passage of time, the audience can observe the growth, blossoming and withering of the tree. By using PoseNet, I was able to allow the audience to control whether time flows forward or backward through body movements.
Here is a video about me playing with it during the IMA Show (I was using KNN Classification instead of PoseNet at first, so the gesture is different from the final version):
The biggest problem I discovered during the IMA Show was that the KNN Classification was not so accurate to detect different body gestures, which made the interactive experience dissatisfying. Also, if people wear clothes in dark colors, the KNN Classification works better than those in light colors. So for the final presentation of the project, I changed to PoseNet so that users can interact with their right hand position. I also drew an ellipse on the canvas to indicate the position of users’ right hand. The final result became better and accurate now.
The final outcome looks like this: