Wormhole Project
WORMHOLE will be a networked installation, connecting two remote sites. At each site, images are projected from above onto a tabletop. The positions of several white bowls on each table are tracked (using infrared LEDs and a video camera). Participants can use these bowls to scoop up images of objects, move them around the tabletop, interact with them, and change them in various ways. At the center of each table surface is a funnel-shaped depression, representing a wormhole that connects the two tables together across networked space. When a projected object is dumped onto one of these wormholes, it disappears and re-emerges out of the wormhole at the opposite location. Thus, a participant at one site can manipulate and mutate an object and then send it as an obscure 'message' to participants at the other site. Each table can be imagined to be upside-down in relation to the other, with the wormhole as a virtual passage from one to the other.
The project will be the first collaboration between the Integrated Media program at the California Institute of the Arts and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinema-Television at USC. Perry Hoberman, who is currently a Visiting Professor at USC and a Visiting Artist at CalArts, is working with students at both institutions to produce the project. In the Integrated Media Visiting Artist Workshop at CalArts, Hoberman and his students (Jeff Cain, Brian Crabtree, Nicholas Fox-Gieg and Doug Goodwin) began work on WORMHOLE during the Fall 2003 semester, testing and prototyping the tracking and projection systems. For the Spring 2004 semester, Hoberman's students at USC will join the project, which will be set up in the Interactive Media Division's new Immersive Media Lab (networked to the Integrated Media Lab at CalArts).
WORMHOLE is being developed with Cycling 74's Max/MSP/Jitter graphical programming enviroment, and will eventually run on two networked Macintosh G5s. At the conclusion of the Spring 2004 semester, the work will be exhibited in the end-of-the-year exhibition at CalArts, which will be networked to the Immersive Media Lab at USC.
• view a Quicktime movie of some early tests.
• the CalArts team (minus Brian)
Comments
Looks great Perry! I am very eager to start helping on this end! I am curious about two things. How does the user present new objects to the system and how does the transformation of those objects occur once the user has them in their bowl? What limitations are inherent in those transformations, if any?
Posted by: Mike | December 15, 2003 12:33 PM
It probably won't be so much about inputting new objects into the system as much as combining and transforming objects that we've already put there.
Probably. Nothing's carved in stone yet.
Users will be able to 'pick up' whatever objects there are at any given moment and do various things with them. Of course, the line between creating new objects and transforming existing ones might be a thin one, if those transformations are significant enough. (By the way, we're using the word 'objects' here in the broadest sense, to include substances, components, creatures, etc.)
Essentially all we'll be reading is the position of each bowl, so we'll use whatever information we can extrapolate from that - movement, speed, direction, gesture, etc. - and map that information to various actions and behaviors.
I don't know of any 'inherent limitations' at this stage, but I'm sure we'll run into some as the work progresses -
Posted by: Perry | December 15, 2003 6:12 PM
This is enormously cool. Do you have a rig and electronics for the CalArts end?
Posted by: Dan | December 19, 2003 7:11 PM
Perry -- you know those cones they have at most museums now, in which you roll a quarter in and watch it slowly circle into the black hole (by way of making a contribution)? You graphic above makes me think of this. Wouldn't it be great to have the quarter come spinning back out at the far end?
Posted by: Dan | December 19, 2003 7:14 PM
Yeah, those spiraling coin exhibits were on our minds when we came up with this - they've got one at the Page Museum which I'd visited a few days before. Having the quarter spin back out again (as an image, anyway) is exactly the kind of thing we're thinking of.
Posted by: Perry | December 22, 2003 5:03 PM
This is so beautiful. Can't wait to see it ;) I also was inspired by the Page Museum coin funnels. I've wished to see the coin's path traced into the funnel many times over.
Posted by: Sandra | January 14, 2004 9:50 PM