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Digital Aquarium

an interactive digital aquarium installation

Digital Aquarium

About the concept and my process

For this project, I built a motion sensing interactive aquarium. My initial intent with this was to build a backdrop for a dance showcase that ended up being cancelled due to COVID-19. The original plan I had in mind was to set up a particle system as a backdrop that would change depending on the dancers movement. As both a dancer and a frequent audience member, I believe the digital media and lighting can really make or break the performance. All of the pieces I have been a part of in my many years of dance have always had preprogrammed lighting and design cues. With this piece, I wanted to create a digital media backdrop to enhance the dancer’s movement in real time.

Since I don’t own a motion tracking camera such as a Kinect, I had to make due with my regular FaceTime camera. This was definitely the biggest challenge, but I learned that motion could be tracked by taking the difference between two frames captured at slightly different time steps. After some filtering and other preprocessing, I was able to track the main blobs created by the moving figure and alter the movement of the particles based off of these positions. The clips below show the process of creating tracked blobs and the next iteration where I played with particles that flowed towards my movement.

Unfortunately with the pandemic, being able to present this in a live performance was no longer a possibility. In turn, I decided to still play around with the program I built and see what interesting installation I could still build at home with my mini projector and a white bed sheet. Due to my projector’s capacity and the size of the space I had to make this installation, I decided to turn the particle system backdrop into an aquarium where the “fish” would move based on the position of the shadow of the figure in front of it. I also tried another iteration of projecting this on my floor. While I do hope to one day implement my original plan on a stage, I truly enjoyed the process and outcome of this piece.