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Terrain

A real time generative digital sandscape

Terrain

About the concept and my process

One of my favorite interactive pieces, Terrain, generates a changing landscape based on the depth of the sand. My inspiration for this piece came from my love of building sandcastles as a kid and picturing the little world that I created come to life. This made me wonder, what if I could make the monochrome sand scapes I built come to life in real time through generative art? After several iterations, I created a shadow sensing program that changes color based on the depth of the sand. The result is a fun, animated tiny landscape.

Along the road, I encountered a few bumps— I had quite a bit of a struggle determining what amount of “shadow” corresponds to what depth and color in the generative landscape. While these are abstract, I didn’t want it to be random. Another hurdle — initially I had planned on projecting the landscape directly back onto the sand to truly make it come to life through some sort of dynamic projection mapping. However, I quickly realized that without a true depth sensing camera (which I am saving up for), it was not possible for the camera to pick up on the contours of the sand. Since the camera was bringing in footage to my program of the installation in real time, it was also bringing in the projection. This caused some strange feedback loop where the change in art being generated was dependent on the art being projected, not the change in sand depth. Ideally, once I have a depth sensing camera, I will be able to take this project to the next level. I have big dreams of sitting in a sand box and building a mini world that changes in real time. While this took some trial and error and is still a work in progress, I am incredibly proud of the result!

Below is a clip of me attempting to project an earlier iteration of the graphics back onto the sand. (It sort of worked but could be improved by a lot)

I ultimately ended up separating the graphics from the sand and just virtually captured the changing landscape as the sand changed and then put it on a slight angle to make it look like a little island. These final results are shown at the top of this page.