‘Starfield’ by Lab212 – Interactive galaxy, the swing and Kinect

‘Starfield’ is the latest installation by Lab212 which uses a swing to manipulate large interactive starry sky. With a Kinect installed behind the swing and a video projector, the software creates a galaxy of stars in which the user wanders with the rhythm of his swing.

The application created using openFrameworks is used to select the area where to track the depth (excluding people around the swing to be included in the computation) and then map the average gray of the main blob in this area to the z property of a camera. In order to keep moving in the galaxy, when users move forward they go twice as fast as when then go backward. The minimalistic rendering is intentionally very simple. It consists of generative squares drawn in OpenGL. For the anaglyph mode, a very simple openGL trick gives quite good results too.

Lab212