Horse Bird Muffin Cycles

For my final project, I used Isadora, Vuo, a Kinect sensor, buttons and two projectors to create a sort of game or test to determine one’s inherent nature as horse, bird, or muffin, or some combination of them.
 Through a series of instructed interactions, a person first chooses an environment from 3 images projected onto a screen. As a person walks toward a particular image, their own moving silhouette is layered onto the image. Text appears to instruct them to move closer to the place they’ve chosen, and the closer they get, the louder an ambient sound associated with their chosen image gets.

Once within a certain proximity, if all goes well, the first part of the test is complete. So they start with a subtly, self-selected identity.

In the next scene, the participant can interact with an image of their choice: the image mirrors their body moving through space and the image changes size based on the volume of sound the participant and their surroundings create.  Stomping loud feet and claps make the image fill the screen and also earn the participant at least one horse ranking, while lot’s of traveling through space accumulates to earn the participants a bird ranking.  Little or in place movement after a designated, as many guessed, puts them in ranks with muffins.

Any of the three events trigger a song affiliated with their rank and the next evaluation to begin.

  This last scene never quite reached my imagined heights, but it was intended for the participant to see themselves on video in real time and delay, still with the moving silhouettes tracked and projected through a difference actor on Isadora. This worked and participants enjoyed dancing with themselves and their echoes onscreen. Parts that needed work were a few shapes actors that were designed to follow movements in different quadrants of the Kinect’s RGB camera field and a patch that counted the number of times the participant crossed a horizontal field completely (to trigger a final horse ranking) or moved from high to low in vertical field, or again, observed themselves with small or no movements until a set time was up.

These functions sometimes worked and did not demonstrate robustness…..  

Nonetheless, each participant was instructed to push a button at the end of their assessment and were able to discover if they were a birdhorsemuffin, a birdhorsehorse, triple horse or some other combination.