Background

This project was created for an intensive one week worskhop with James Tichenor & Joshua Walton from the Rockwell Group. We were tasked with designing an 'interactive space' for the Radison SAS Hotel in Copenhagen. The workshop started with an introduction of the work The Rockwell Group do, a tour of the Radison SAS and an intense concept generation session, followed by a rapid development of working prototypes.

Photos from our site visit

Concept

I decided to design an interactive space that would react to people's shadows as they walked into the lobby. On our tour we observed that the lobby was a dead space and not somewhere people enjoyed staying in. Also, when you entered it was unclear where you needed to go, as they had removed the traditional check-in counter and I wanted to help guide new guests correctly.

Technical Details

This was a 'skills upgrade' workshop, so inspired by the shadow installations by the like of Mine-Control I decided to do something similar myself. Detecting shadows, and then reacting to them is very processing intensive so I needed to use something faster than Flash or Processing which I'm used to. The Rockwell Group use openFrameworks a huge amount so I decided this would be a good opportunity to try learn a new skill. After a few days battling the sharp learning curve of C++, and uses XCode, I managed to get a basic demo up and running. In the future, I hope to build on this experiment further.

Photos from the prototyping