Abstract

Walking in the woods a path is created. The path and the walker both have a visible presence that can be followed. In a city environment your presence does not leave a path. In these two situation people leave a physical presence, but the environments deal with the variables differently. I am showing the non-visible presence that is left in a city environment through interaction. The presence of the past walker will be compared to the presence of the current walker resulting in a visible path.



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Requirement:
Flash 8 and a Web Cam.




Inspiration

inspiration


We had an assignment togo to a location and observe everything around us. When I did this I noticed the patterns of people walking. The direction and speed of their walking, this made we think of paths. I started to compare a path in the woods and a path in the city.

I found this illustration out of The Design of Culture Volume 1 Number 1, by Joanna Nilsson. She illustrates the paths and flow of trains and people, the result was interesting and similar to my sketches. I wanted to take this concept further and visualize it interactively.






Process

I did a lot of research with flash and motion detection. The new release of Flash 8 allows for the use of Bitmap Matrices. With this technology I was able to track the motion of the user as they interact with the pre-recorded paths. This idea would compare the presence of the user with the recorded presence of the walkers.




I worked with the idea of elapse time. I wanted to see the complete path at any give time. After gathering all my footage and compiling it all, the coding began. This was a very difficult task to create a solid comparison between the two interactions.







Media







Contact

Todd Vanderlin
www.toddvanderlin.com
me [at] toddvanderlin.com
339.223.0663



Audio by kenneth kirschner