WeatherWorlds: Body & Space at the National Children’s Museum
https://www.design-io.com/projects/weatherworlds
Weather Worlds is an interactive installation that allows kids to immerse and experience a dynamic environment with “superpowers”. Using their body, children can conjure a storm, release a twisting tornado, or rain down bolts of lightning from their fingertips. The connection of visuals on the screen to the physical body makes the rain and experiences feel real. The museum’s intentions are not only to embody multiple senses but to showcase to kids that anything is possible and allows them to express their creativity.
In using soft technologies, I wonder if there could be some form of texture created on the walls that form movement as added depth to the moving storms. It would be interesting to see how natural movement of cloth or some soft materials could help this interaction also embody a sense of text rather than just movement in space.
The paper I chose discusses design and interaction considerations when designing for multisensory, telepresent experiences. In an art context, this is important because typically an art piece might focus on one or two senses of sight or sound, but when creating a multisensory experience, how do you integrate and balance each of the senses clearly and uniformly.
1 Weather worlds – interactive installation. (n.d.)., from https://www.design-io.com/projects/weatherworlds
2 Snibbe, Scott & Raffle, Hayes. (2009). Social immersive media: Pursuing best practices for multi-user interactive camera/projector exhibits. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings. 1447-1456. 10.1145/1518701.1518920.