Kevin Thies – Looking Outwards 10

LA HYBRIDScope CITY from Filipa Valente on Vimeo.

limiLAB is run by Filipa Valente, a Portugese architect and interactive artist based in Los Angeles. She did her undergrad and Masters in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, and her Masters in Media Art and Architecture MEDIASCAPES at SciArc. Her work explores space, and leverages light and sound.

Of her works, I found the Hybridscope City to be the most evocative. The project was sited at LAX airport, and passersby getting off the plane could cycle through the different real-time sights and sounds of the city. The form itself is also like an organic web, or specifically filleted voronori meshes. The projection mapping and skeleton tracking were powered by a kinect and a custom max/MSP/Jitter script.

While it is interactive, it doesn’t look intuitive. In the video, people really have to reach out, and it’s said that it needs a person to calibrate first. Plus, it doesn’t look obviously interactive. Since the images are projected downwards, a person’s shadow would only get in the way of the projector, which I think would make people less likely to interact with the piece.