Currently I am working with Rebecca and to construct only one of the boxes we presented in our previous idea. Right now the idea is that when the user begins to play with the needles sound will start playing of ambient noises from the woods. When the user steps away the sounds will stop and an image will get projected on a wall nearby. We are not sure if the track will change each time a person lifts their hands or if it will be a long track that will pause, and we are not yet sure what the visuals will look like, so we want to spend the next week getting a better idea of what the digital image might be.
To get here, we first hooked up two webcams and layered two video streams, one from a bowl of water and one from the pine needles. Doing it this way it was difficult to get the color values and it did not do anything for us as far as the interaction itself went. We brainstormed and thought about what we wanted to explore and decided we want to explore the interaction between the natural and digital and get the user to play with a natural element to create a digital outcome. We want it to be full of surprises and somewhat meditative. And so we will focus on getting this interaction right with one box before moving on to another. Right now aside from the image we need to figure out our technology. We played around with a Kinect and as the video quality was much better I enjoyed the interaction more, but I’m not sure if the depth tracking will work in a short distance. We will have to do more testing and find what is most natural and effective after we have a more concrete idea of how we want to capture and manipulate the image.