Intimate Body Scanner

Human contact is an intimate thing.  Whether it be your best friend, your significant other, or sitting on your mom’s lap when you were a kid, whenever we touch, it becomes familiar.  I am fairly certain, even with my eyes closed, I could discern sitting on my mother’s lap from sitting on anybody else’s.  My entire childhood, I have memorized her contours and what that feels like.  When we touch, we unknowingly begin to memorize contours and textures and even temperatures.  This scan shows the inaccuracy and familiarity of memorizing another human by touch.

Each person is touching a wire which is connected to a computer.  When the two people touch, a circuit is completed and a signal is sent to a computer which then records the point in 3D space at which the “scanner” touched the person being scanned via Kinect.  A 3D point cloud is then created of all of the points where the two people touched.

In this specific video, the two people filmed were meeting for the first time.  Their interactions had a lot to do with her telling him things about his body that maybe he never noticed.  At one point, she tells him that she likes the veins on the back of his legs, and he nervously thanks her.  This is the first time these two people have touched, and she is already noticing things about him that she will probably not forget whether she realizes it or not. (Github)