Project Brief
The inspiration is from Vancouver, the city we live in. I was born and raised in a dry city, it was literally SHOCKING to me how Vancouver rains that much! Last year, the year 2017, Vancouver rained 154 days.
I always imagine that we can control or change the thing we cannot in real life. Of course, we can’t stop the rain or makes it rains harder in the tangible world, but in the digital world, you probably could!
Timeline & My Role
4 weeks | April 2018
Personal Project | Fabrication, Visual Design, Physical Computing, Projection Mapping
Featured Show | Emily Carr Master of Design Year I Final Project
Process - Coding & Developing
Testing demo video : Water Ripple (Projection #1)
- Rain (Projection #2)
For the rain graphic, I used TouchDesigner to create the particle system, since it's GPU-driven, could have better performance and fluidity.
I used Leap Motion as an input to capture different gestures of the participant's hand. As the distance increased between their hand and the leap Motion, the rain will be heavier, and you can hear the audio of the rain drop louder (yes that's interactive too!).
And I also coded to control the direction of the "rain" according to participant's hand position, as well as some details, like the amount of particles, the color and the birthrate.
Testing demo video : Rain (Projection #2)
Challenge & Reflections
This Project is almost THE HARDEST THING I'VE EVER DONE in my life so far (lol). For me, working for the entire 4 years and 1 year of work on the screen, made me a terrible person at making things by hand...
But for this project, I was told there's no bracket I could use to install my projector (as I want it to facing down, projecting on the floor), so I have to build a wooden shelf from scratch on my own and have to climb on to a 15ft ladder to install it. Though lots of my classmate think it's not worth it, and don't understand why I spend so much time and money on my project. But eventually, but the help of the studio technicians (Yang and Sharon, the sweetest people I met at school so far! ), I finished it and had it showed during studio critique on time.
This has taught me to push one's boundary, and never limited your imagination for a work, just for something you think it's "too hard". Nothing is "hard" as long as you are willing to work hard, even sacrificing a lot of time to rest and money to eat XD
Really glad in the end I made that happen!
