Night Bright is an interactive installation by Design I/O ( Emily Gobeille & Theo Watson) of nocturnal discovery where children use their bodies to light up the nighttime forest and discover the creatures that inhabit it. Children listed to sounds in the forest and play a nighttime game of hide and seek. Some creatures are curious and will investigate the light, while others are frightened and will hide in the shadows. Likewise, children can grow nocturnal plants and release fireflies from their flowers.
Night Bright uses an Xbox Kinect for tracking and takes the position of the children and their distance from the wall and uses it to calculate the location and amount of light they emit into the forest. The light is calculated with a shader and some of the other creatures in the forest ( like the fireflies ) also emit light which helps light up the environment. Creatures exist at different depths in the forest and the ones that are further back take more light to discover. Some creatures will also only come out when the forest is quiet, so you have to listen for the sounds they make to locate them.
For this project Theo and Emily developed a bunch of custom tools for working with the forest elements that enabled them to have the creatures aware of the structure of the environment ( like the edges of trees, rocks etc ). These tools made it easy for the team to have birds land on branches and the woodpecker to peck on trees, for example. Also used are animated sequences with accompanying xml files to describes different behaviours which they could trigger, making it quite easy to chain sequences together and have the creatures naturally react to the children’s movement.
The project was made with openFrameworks 007 and uses ofxKinect and ofxControlPanel addons.
Night Bright was created for the Bumble children’s cafe in Los Altos, California.
Thanks to Theo for the detail info.
