Monkeys & Robots

ArtFall is a collaboration between Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, in association with Mindshare Labs.  ArtFall is an interactive installation that allows visitors to construct a dynamic physical simulation by drawing on a whiteboard.  For centuries, people have played games that require nothing more than a pen and something to write on. ArtFall opens up a whole new space of possibilities.

ArtFall from Eric Gradman and Brent Bushnell on Vimeo.

When you draw on this whiteboard, your art is captured by a camera.  A custom computer vision algorithm analyzes your art and inserts its contours into a physics engine.  In this physics engine we simulate a two dimensional world wherein simple objects drop from the top of the whiteboard and bounce off your artwork.  A projector overlays the results of this simulation back onto the whiteboard.

It then appears as though circles and squares “fall down” the whiteboard, collide with your artwork, with one another, and with the edges of the whiteboard.  The shapes slide down ramps, collect in concavities, balance precariously on one another, and eventually come to rest at the bottom of the whiteboard.

We added some extra features, like controlling the direction of gravity using an iPhone accelerometer.  And when installed in a loud environment, a bandpass filter turns musical “thumps” into physical impulses that agitate the virtual objects in the ArtFall world.

Building and testing ArtFall with Brent was incredibly fun.  We were able to develop the system largely in two independent pieces.  I mostly built the computer vision and reverse-projection component using OpenCV in C++, while Brent used the Chipmunk Physics library in Python to do the physics.  Somewhat late in the game, we joined the two pieces together using OSC for interprocess communication.

I make that sound simple, but in fact there were quite a few very late nights spent hacking this code together.  But the most memorable occasion was one morning at 3am when we finally got a proof of concept working, and we could see shapes bouncing off our artwork.

We were completely exhausted, but we still spent at least two excited hours drawing on the board, erasing one another’s ideas, and inventing games to play on ArtFall.  The shaky iPhone video we took of the event is hilarious to watch. Even our half-working debugging test was so much fun to play with, we couldn’t stop playing!  That night, we reinvented skeeball, mazes, pachinko, and other games that have probably never existed before.

And when we finally finished ArtFall and watched how other people played with it, I realized that the limits of this sort of interactive technology are beyond my imagination.  Every new drawing suggests a new way of having fun with interactive whiteboards.

ArtFall was created in association with Mindshare Labs.  Mindshare Labs is a collective of artistic technologists who are working together to build interactive art pieces.

Once a month, we present our work at Los Angeles’ Mindshare event, which brings together all manner of creative thinkers including artists, scientists, engineers, dancers, and architects.  Each month there are talks on a wide variety of topics, as well as new art. Having a monthly event like Mindshare has really focused me on keeping to my desired rate of creative output.

If you’d like to see ArtFall or any of the other fun things coming out of Mindshare Labs, I encourage you to get a ticket for next week’s upcoming Mindshare event. And check in with Mindshare Labs to see what else is cooking.  We’re building Mindshare Labs to collectively improve our interactive art; if you have an event that you think would benefit from interactive installations like ArtFall, please let us know!

* UPDATES *

LAWeekly wrote an article in their Style Council about Mindshare and ArtFall: http://blogs.laweekly.com/style_council/events/last-night-enlightened-debauch/

interactive