Ethan Kennerly

Here are some ideas for projects about space.

GTA/APB
Blind Frogger
Fairy Trails
Sound of Dance
Generative Geometry

GTA/APB (Grand Theft Auto / All Points Bulletin)
One user is robber, playing GTA.
But there are modern forms surveillance: public video cameras, tracking devices in cars and cell phones, cell phone cameras, satellite imaging, and so on.
The other user is the cop, and has access to all this surveillance, and is trying to keep track of the robber, causing the robber to eventually be caught.
This project offers a fun, interactive critique on the pervasion of surveillance.

Blind Frogger
Audio-only interface with 3D spatial audio. Wear blindfold and headphones, and use a cane (with accelerometer and/or position sensor in the cane and headphone).
You are blind and are crossing a street. But the cars are not stopping.
Essentially you are the frog in frogger.
When in a lane of traffic, the car explicitly honks at you.
You also hear cars approach and recede.
This compassion-building exercise introduces how blind persons interact with urban environments in a fun and interactive method that ought to capture the attention of anyone.

Fairy Trails
Paint gossamyr particle systems in 3D using a wiimote.
When your paint stroke is done, however, a fairy is created which continues to repeat your last stroke until faded.
Inspired by Perceptive Pixels (seen at Wired NextFest).
This project produces temporary visual art with an intuitive interface accessible to all ages.

Sound of Dance
Position or accelerameter sensors on hands are mapped to the synthesis of musical instruments. Musical instrument positional data maps to the dancer's position. The dancer's motion triggers events in the music and may alter the tempo, rhythm, and perhaps other parameters.
Inspired by Harp of Light (heard at Wired NextFest).
This project augments and encourages dance by anyone with hands and feet.

Generative Geometry
From geometrical primitives (tetrahedra, cubes, cones, and polyhedra) translate, rotate, scale, and multiply to create fantastic lattices, organic forms, and alien architecture. Rather than specify specific vertices and polygonal data, generative modeling uses a structure of operations to manipulate primitives. Instead of editing flat data of vertices, any operation can be modified, which cascades through subsequent operations, enabling dramatic and aesthetically pleasing changes with a single input.

While such procedural modeling has been done before, what is novel here, is that the interface uses a wand (a wiimote) for an intuitive interface that a novice can appreciate, and results are displayed and recordable in real-time, so that the performance of modifying the form becomes a work of art.

This is inspired by the demoscene community, the procedural modeling tool used to create demoscene art, Werkkzeug, procedural architecture of L-systems and hyperstructures, and the generative modeling language.

Technically, to enable real-time processing, and completion within the semester, the project would be implemented in an high-level interpreted language (such as Python) so that the algorithms may be changed during run-time and low-level rendering is delegated to a graphics engine (such as OGRE). Wiimote drivers available and demo'd by the engineering school, would be incorporated with a standard bluetooth adapter to rapidly port wiimote functionality to a desktop environment.

This project interweaves performance art, algorithmic art, and experimentation in intuitive interfaces.