Final Idea's Proposal (not marry to it yet)
An experiment of a playful interaction.
Steps of thoughts:
Step 1
A performance of people's movements(body movements and thoughts/dream changes) on beds.
Every half of our days are on our own bed, watching videos, go through our thoughts, go over todays' moments, playing with phone, pillow chatting, life thinking, relaxing and mostly important is sleeping and dreaming...
I want to express this important time of people's daily life with dancing, music and visual ways.
Maybe the most straight forward way of express that is using a bed-like stage for the performance. And the music and visual will be generated by the dancing process.
jumping bed...?
Step 2
For the interaction part of this project, it's kind of an intuitive awareness of how to play/interact with this jumping bed for most of people. Because most of us have seen or played with jumping bed. So it will be just let people play and jump on the jumping bed.
By jumping on it, people can hear the generative music on the air and see the visual effects on the bed's surface that affected by their different jumping movements.
different jumping movements:
- Jumping slowly and lightly —— soft and light music(with few notes and tone color), and single color visual effect with little changes.
- Jumping fast and heavy —— more intense/diverse music, and more complex visual effects.
There will be different situations of how many people play it: only one person and two or more people play it. How to show the difference between different situations? Why it is important to show the distinction?
the question evoked the Step 3 of thinking
The whole process of playing with jumping bed is kind of interesting, the emotions between play it by oneself and play it with one or more people should be different.
What I want to express?
Playful?
if the point is playful and at the mean time interact with the music and visual, then play it with people is also a perspective of that interaction.
"together"
should I highlight the meaning of play it "together"?
more people play on it, the players might be more happier? the music and visual will be more enjoyable?
The technical sides:
1.
I am thinking of using distance sensor below the jumping bed to sense the distance of different jumping movements. (jumping slowly - shallow, jumping heavy - deep down from the surface)
I will abandon the pressure sensor because it is not that accurate for the range of that sensor and also for the position of people jumping around. also for the different weight of people.
2.
By using buttons on the stairs that people have to use to go on the jumping bed to detect how many people is playing with it.
3.
For the generative music and visual part
I would like to connect Arduino and the Ableton live music software to set up music notes and tones colors.
And to generate visual by using Max/msp, which also will connect to the Arduino to get the real time values of different sensors. (?)
Still questioning of all of these above...
and is it too simple for interacting? do you care about the music and visual that generated by your movements?
or is it necessary to save it for players? or just an experience of playing? too many questions