Resume · Projects
Interactive Shadow Animation for Live Performance
· 2013
Shadow Figures: An Interactive Shadow Animation Platform for Performance (2013). Front projection is a good way to make large displays, but it breaks down once someone interacts with it: a performer in front of a projection casts a shadow and blocks the imagery. Even the Metropolitan Opera’s Siegfried ran into it with its projection mapping. Shadow Figures eliminates the performer’s shadow and occlusion, then replaces or augments the shadow with pre-recorded and generated imagery, so the shadow can become an independent character.
Detecting a shadow in visible light proved too noisy against a projected, changing background, so the system reads the performer in infrared, which neither the projected background nor a generated shadow disturbs. Built in openFrameworks with OpenCV, it drives two projectors, each corner-warped onto its surface, and runs through a set of modes: the performer’s real shadow, no shadow, a computed shadow, a recorded shadow, a recorded shadow that tracks the performer, and a tween between them, with front projection onto the performer. Despite projector latency and calibration imprecision, it worked as a proof of concept for interactive shadow performance.
A real-time platform that swaps a performer’s shadow for a generated one that moves independently, using an infrared camera and projection mapping