jamieh-Looking-Outwards-04

Volume, designed by Softlab, consists of a grid of 100 mirror panels that respond and redirect light and sound, as well as interact with human movement through depth cameras. The mirrors panels rotate to face the nearest person. Based on the volume of the ambient sound in the space, LEDs on the sides of the panels light up and the panels move vertically. The interface of the project was coded and built in Processing. Cameras are placed overhead to track people’s positions. The data is then managed with OCP and Arduino microcontrollers.

What I like about this project is how they took sound, which is intangible, and gave it spacial qualities through the rotation towards the person as well as quantitative information of the volume of the sound through the LED lights. Light and sound, which doesn’t seem to move, now visually circulate through space. I like that it reacts to human movement, but based on their description of the interface using the weighted average to find the closest person to the cube of mirrors makes me wonder what happens when there are more people who are standing close to the installation.