More and more developer-artists are seeking new ways to capitalize on the features brought by the Kinect. We’ve seen numerous creative works from Kinect Virtual Strings to Kinect Interactive Light shows. This time however, Kinect artistry brings us to a whole new level by blurring the border of virtual and actual. Developers Marynel Vázquez and Madeline Gannon presents their Interactive Projection Mapping project, an ode to Kinect and all digital artists around the world. In this video release, they demonstrated how a projector can produce the desired 3d image and with the Kinect, the artist/user can control the lighting of the item. This then produces the seemingly realistic virtual image and teases the eye and mind to believe that the virtual image is actually a material item in front of the user.
Here is a detailed description from the makers:
“This project was inspired by the work of an incredibly talented community of artists and designers that are using video mapping as a medium to reinterpret and transform banal, expected environments. The work of Pablo Valbuena was a strong influence over our explorations, and we sought to introduce dynamic interactivity to augmented sculpture as our novel addition to this community.
Developed in C++, Openframeworks, and OpenNI, we are using the depth mapping capabilities of the kinect to evaluate the viewer(participant’s) hand, and position it as the light source of the physical model. In effect, their hand becomes the sun, lighting or dimming our abstracted cityscape.”
We know virtual reality but with the recent developments of the Kinect and interactive environments, are we seeing the end of virtual reality and the start virtual environments on actual planes?
For more information about the project, visit the Interactive Projection Mapping website.
