v3ga

I spent an intense week-end in Paris where I perfomed a coding session with Processing (see my previous post). I had the pleasure to be associated with Simon Geilfus for the whole Sunday afternoon and we just had six hours to produce a program around the theme “Playable”, knowing that our production would be shown during the final ceremony on the evening (pressure, pressure!).
Fortunately we met the day before around a beer so that we had time to plan things a bit and talked on how we could possibly interpret that theme. We quickly agreed on the fact that it would be a good opportunity to let the audience participate and play with our application in some way.
We ended up re-using and re-mixing some code we had taken with us, and produced an animation which rendered 30000 black and white audio-reactive particles. Simon did a great job on this, by using a special technique with a pixel shader for individual particle drawing (cheers for showing me that :-).
People were then able to send SMS messages, and words were then dynamically assembled by picking up some of the particles and coloring them. All of their movements were controlled by some flocking behaviour. That was awesome, and I think people really liked it as we received almost 50 messages in 2 minutes…! We had very positive feedback, though a last-minute-we-didnot-let-run-the-application-enough-time bug prevented the application to display the whole set of received messages.

Links:

• Vimeo video
• Photos by Ludovic Gibert
• Photos by Les designers interactifs
• Photos by Quasimondo