Guidelines
This project is an expansion on the ideas explored in a prior project for the same Interactive Architecture class. This projects takes the 0-dimensional measurement of “heat” at a point and expands it out to a 2-dimensional measure of “heat” over a space. As people travel through an area, their motion is tracked and areas will slowly “heat up” as they are walked on more. The heat is displayed via projection onto the surface.
This simple change radically expands the implications of the project. The system gains the ability to capture behavioral trends that are far more complex when space usage was only monitored at a point. Upon entering the area, a person can see paths left by people that have gone before; these can act as “guidelines” to assist the person in navigating the space. In other words, the projected heat map becomes a form of collective intelligence for the space, as created by inhabitants as they go about their daily business.
The guidelines could also serve the opposite function. By showing which area are commonly used, the guidelines could show a person where they can get away from the hustle and bustle, or could inspire a person to explore in an area that is obviously undervisited. So, the guidelines can be paths of both the most and least resistance, depending on your purpose.
The system works by setting up a camera to surviel an area. Motion is detected by comparing the current frame to a series, and image globbing is then performed to find the centers of each mass in motion. These points are then algebraically projected from the camera plane to the floor plane, where it is added to the floor “heat”. The changed heatmap is then transformed from the floor plane to the plane of a projector that projects the map onto the area. If more cameras and projectors are added, they add redundancy to system, making detection more accurate and projection less likely to be interrupted by shadowing.
We couldn’t get cameras of high enough resolution or with a wide enough angle lens, so our practical demonstration was limited to a scaled model that used magnets on a white surface as analogues for human movement. The influence of motion was also increased to showcase the concept.
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