Won Yang + Beyza toptal: Sims Live!

We started with the idea of projection mapping installations on buildings with the curiosity of ‘What is everyone up to?’

Walking down the streets and looking at the architecture you see some lights on and some off.  Do you ever wonder what everyone does after a rough day? Lay down rest a while and head to the kitchen to make some tea? Or maybe it’s Friday night and you’ve invited friends for a couple beers? Or more in an abstract sense, you are staring at the city landscape and thinking ‘Are we living in a video game?’ We all work, eat, drink, talk, dance, break, heal, feel, love, forget, sleep and wake up as if we were characters in the game, Sims.

Sims Live, inspired from the game Sims Tower reveals the private lives of people by projecting 3 stories of 3 apartments on a building. As for the interaction, pressing the button(on the plinth) a certain amount of times enables each floors of the building to reveal a pre-recorded/programmed video as if you were playing the game Sims Tower.

Process:

We prepared three videos for each floors; a woman at home, people having a beer on a Friday night and an actress practicing her dance. The projection on the building was executed through VPT and programmed with Processing. A button connected to an Arduino was installed on to a plinth – which was in front of the wall. We extracted the outlines of the interiors of each floors and saved them as separate layers and programmed it so each time the button was pressed, each layer of the outline would reveal; as if you were playing the actual game.

Won Yang
Beyza toptal