Drexel University
College of Computing and Informatics
College of Computing and Informatics
Ethereal is a fully immersive interactive art exhibition designed to be displayed in physical space. Using heart rate sensors, the participants will affect the art and music in the room and have the opportunity to create and play, in collaboration with strangers, within the space.
In the span of nine months, our team plans on creating an immersive digital art exhibit for our senior capstone project. We believe that an immersive digital media exhibit that is dynamically affected by the outcome of different biosensors for residents of the Philadelphia area will facilitate spontaneous creative collaboration between strangers. We’ll know this is true when we see participants communicating with each other to achieve an outcome. Participants enter the exhibit with their armbands on and locate the wall that corresponds with their color. Participants are instructed to focus on their wall alone, in order to learn the mechanics of the exhibit. Given matching graphics to learn with participants increase their heart rates to view a change in size and color of their graphic. Participants decrease their heart rates to view the adverse change in size and color of their graphic. Participants are instructed to explore the differences their heart rates can have on different aspects of the exhibit, and are given representations of their specific aspects of the exhibit to interact with. We decided to use TouchDesigner to build our exhibit for a few reasons. The first being that it is open source, and the non-commercial license is free. Additionally, there is the more documentation and resources available for TouchDesigner than other tools which could accomplish similar things. There is also a faculty member who is very ept in the software and can help us overcome a lot of the challenges we face in using it. We are using Arduino boards to build custom heart rate sensors specifically designed and programmed to control the art. Participants will wear the heart rate sensors in the form of bracelets during the exhibit.
