Abstract:
Everything we experience is a product of both mind and matter. Our complex central nervous system gives sensory faculty the ability to process visual details, and lead us to understand the reality surrounds us. This project is focused on using art in technology to trick our human visual perception and revealing the secret of objective “real” and subjective “unreal”.
Concept and Questions:
Human are biologically wired to relay on our eyes to perceive the world. They are our initial step to understand our natural environment. When our ancestors used their own eyes to look at the sky, they concluded that the earth is flatten and it lies in the center of universe.
Eyes are important tools for human to receive the visual information that is surrounding us. They are symbols of truth to persuade us for what to believe, just like we always heard– “Seeing is believing.” But do the eyes always present the reality to ourselves?
The project will focus on the exploration of visual perception. Creating the live perception shift through a modified physical environment and delivering an awareness of what is “real” or “unreal”. Fooling audiences’ eyes to challenge their visual experience.
Research:
my research is about human visual perception, and trying to find out how does the sensory faculty and cognition operate with each other. The main focus will be put into different visual illusion research, collecting approved scientific optical theories and merging artistic visual content into these theories for building an interactive installation. The research will also focus on the precedents in installation art and investigate the techniques and concepts behind them.
Impetus and Goal:
The goal of my project is trying to deliver amazed and impressive visual experience to the audiences. Through these visual experience, audiences’ mind should be led to a meditative experience and rethink a different aspect of the living world, questions such as, “Does our eyes always tell the truth of universe to us?” “Which reality is most real to us? The physic reality or the perceptual reality?”, etc.
Audience and Experience:
This project targets to the audiences who are adults and interested in both technology and art. The project will deliver a visual experience which contains aesthetic optical illusion and sounds in order to trigger audiences’ curiosity. This experience should claim down the audiences and bring them to a meditative atmosphere and lead them understand the connection between the human being and the universe.
Making Process:
(prototype for the strobe light illusion)
My first prototype was using Arduino to control led strobe light and match a certain frequency of vibrated objects to create the visual illusion. Many different materials were tested in this process, such as wood stick, rotating fans, fabrics, papers and other soft materials. Only few of them work out as expected result. They are dry flowers and goose feathers, both materials’ hardness and weight are just right enough to be vibrated by electronic magnet and creating Delayed Visual Feedback.
(prototype for the perspective illusion)
The second prototype I was working on is the air screen display. Using a computer fan to generate a high-speed airflow with mist in high concentration. As the result, user can see the visual content which are cast in the middle of air. Then using Kinect as tracking sensor to track the user’s location and generate rotated 3D object which follow up user’s visual perceptive. Ideally, user’s eyes will be tricked by their visual system and seeing a 3D object in a 2D screen. But the tracking data from Kinect seems can be easily interrupted by different light sources and the colors from user’s wearing. The unstable tracking data makes the visual content to be joggling. This is an issue I may have to fix for the next semester.
(prototype for the spatial illusion)
The third prototype was targeted to test the projection mapping. To project an unlimited virtual 3D space in a 2D surface. But, because of lack of time for making the visual content, users did not notice the space changes through the projection. Few things still need to be improved for this project, such as the projection scale, and more complex 3D spatial animation.
