CTIN 542: Interactive Design & Production

« My Open Mic | Main

May 10, 2005

Kiosk Project Final Summary

The Assignment

In the Spring of 2005, the CTIN542 Interactive Design & Production Class was a semester-long focus on interactive media in public spaces. The class examined public space pieces for several reasons:

1) Public spaces interactive media are one-offs and designed around particular environments;
2) The newest and most experiment technologies often appear in public spaces before being mass-marketed;
3) Conceiving, designing, and producing interactive media for public spaces
is a macrocosmic example of doing an interactive media thesis
project.

The semester began with researching prior public space pieces and museums and developed into the production of a public space installation, conceived, designed, and executed by the class and with the assistance of faculty from the Division of Interactive Media, Cinema-Television School, and TrojanVision.

The Development Process

The class decided to use the Trojan Vision Interactive Kiosk for their experiment. It is conveniently located at the center of campus and already equipped with many of the necessities for a public space installation. The kiosk had gone through many iterations, last of which was a sound-off station for students. The basic idea was to give a voice to the USC campus community by allowing passers-by to "Say What You Think." The questions ranged from "Does the United States have the right to make pre-emptive military strikes?" to "What is your favorite Homecoming memory?"

The responses from faculty, students and staff were recorded, sent via a live fiber optic cable to the Trojan Vision studio in the Zemeckis Center and recorded to a hard-drive. Thereafter, they were edited and played during commercial blocks during regular programming. However, the kiosk did not get many students to interact with it, and at the time of the class project, was being used only to display Trojan Vision programs.

The CTIN 542 class examined the possibilities of pushing the recording/distributing element already exisisting within the kiosk. To create a unique experience, night time was chosen as the best display time, since the campus is relatively dark at night, and so attracting attention would be simpler.

This development process led to the creation of a performance space, in which students could record stop-frame animations that were then displayed as projections around the kiosk.

The Implementation

Using Jitter running on a G5 with an iSight, a still image is captured every few seconds to the hard drive. After 30 seconds, the captured stills are saved to a Quicktime video, and the process begins again. A central monitor displays what the camera is currently seeing, flashes each time a frame is captured, and displays a timer bar that shows how much time is left before the process restarts. While stills are being captured for the next video, the previous video is /played back and projected for the participants to receive immediate feedback and a payoff for their interaction.

The kiosk was draped in white sheets that served two purposes: 1) to project the movies on, and 2) to effectively and simply change the look of the entire kiosk.

The kiosk ran for two evenings at the end of the semester, managing to draw crowds of otherwise disinterested students for short bursts, and even held the attention of some students for more than an hour at a time.

This experience in transforming the kiosk is one that will now be passed on to the future second year Masters students, hopefully beginning a new tradition for the Division of Interactive Media.

Posted by kellee at May 10, 2005 12:00 AM

Comments

Post a comment