An interactive light sculpture where the colors are generated by the viewer’s hand movements.
The sculpture is made of pvc, wood, dichroic tiles, led strips, a teensy micro controller, and a webcam.
The leds are positioned in a circle around the dichroic tiles which are illuminated by the light traveling around in a circle creating a rainbow pattern on the face of the sculpture.
When you step in front of the webcam and raise your hands, the moving light stops and can be controlled with your hand movements.
This is accomplished through a machine learning algorithm running in a P5.js sketch that identifies hands. The center of your hand is mapped to the led strips allowing you to control the colors produced by the light sculpture.
After user testing, I decided that the piece works better with a potentiometer to control the speed of the lights. Users were not able to understand that they needed to have their hands far away from the pieces so that the webcam could register them. Additionally, the webcam / machine learning algorithm has difficulty finding viewer’s hands in the dark. It would likely work much better with a Kinect.
