Insilio (2006)

An early attempt in physical computing

Part of my BA I focussed on physical computing and interaction design. In a project with Annette Ebi we sketched and prototyped Insilio, an installation that intended to extend the Google Earth experience into the physical (note: this was before the Wii console came out). Sorry the bad video quality, it was the time of 3gp-video phones.

Technical concept: an infrared sensor on the ceiling above a trampoline measures the distance to the jumper‘s head. A script written in the open source physical computing plattform “Arduino” translates the electrical resistance of the sensor to digital values. In Google Earth we captured and converted different pans and zooms into Quicktime movie clips. Processing (open source software for generative art) then translated the data from Arduino to actual frame positions in the movie clips.

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