TGarden is an investigation of how people make sense of and navigate in rich and dynamically evolving media spaces. Given the rise of ubiquitous computing and realtime media synthesis, we’re anticipating the need for coherent yet supple ways for designers to create such complex interactive media spaces and for people to inhabit them.
In a TGarden space, visitors wearing instrumented clothing creates and modulate video and sound based on their gesture and movement. In effect, visitors write video and sound by their movement.
For 2001-2002, we concentrate on using wireless sensors on the body to track gesture. We have built a state evolution system that responds continuously to sensor statistics, synthesizes and marshalls media in realtime.
In TGarden spaces, we use a combination of costumes outfitted with sensors, video tracking, realtime sound and video processing, and gestural pattern tracking.
Links:Research concerns include the design of continuously varying narrative spaces, how people improvise meaningful gesture, and factors of tangibility and coherence such as latency, temporal (musical) texture and rhythm. Our goal is to come up principles of design that should be useful for creating and inhabiting responsive media spaces. This research thread parallels a series of international productions in Europe and the United States.