A somewhat strange set of projects for my first look outwards.

Jelly Swarm

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKR0uOT_xTI&rel=0]

An installation for the Vancouver Aquarium, Jelly Swarm consists of a large, triangulated metal support hung with lighted origami jelly fish. The lighting patterns are generated based on interactions between neighboring jelly fish or by visitors using a touchscreen controller. My initial interest was purely visual — I’ve always enjoyed how jelly fish exhibits at aquariums use light to emphasize the structure and motion of the creatures. But I think what sets this apart from other interactive light installations I’ve seen is the use of origami for the jelly fish. The angles of the objects and the supporting frame are a nice contrast to the mushy blobs in the surrounding tanks. That said, I wish that I could see it in the space. The lighting interaction seems very simple (and not very interactive), but perhaps no more is required given the scale and layout of the space.

Portrait of the Ghost Drummer

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/34682556 w=400&h=280]

Motion capture of a drummer is played back in 3D space without the drummer or the drums. Instead, the drummer’s sticks trace arcs through space that build up to represent the whole performance. There’s a lot of potential in visualizing a drum performance using stick motion because the drum set is such a complex instrument to play. When I first read about this piece, I hoped it would reveal some of the secrets of how drummers move between drums so quickly and perform intricate patterns, but I was disappointed by the execution. First, and most importantly, I thought the quality of the performance was lacking; I was distracted by parts that seemed out of time and tempo changes that didn’t feel deliberate. But accepting the performance, I still found the visualization cluttered and confusing. Being able to follow arcs in addition to hits was helpful, but while a real drum set is necessarily compact, a virtual drum set can be spread out, which I think would help the viewer better follow the whole pattern.

Loop Waveform Visualizer

Loop Waveform Visualizer is a relatively simple in-browser music visualizer by Felix Turner (requires Google Chrome to run). While I like the simple “retro-graphics” aesthetic, I’m more interested in the technology behind it. While this isn’t the most impressive demo of WebGL that I’ve seen, it’s one of the first projects I’ve seen that makes use of the Web Audio API in Chrome. The ability to do more advanced things with audio in the browser is exciting, especially since most browser developments are (understandable) visual. I hope to see wider support for web audio in the near future. More information and images are available at Create Digital Motion.

—