Long View

Long View. Gesture-interactive installation, © 2013 Patrick FitzGerald.

Long View is a gesture-based interactive installation that offers the viewer the ability to affect animated elements in a projected space in ways that the artists hope will increase awareness of our fragile and temporary relationship to our planet.

Our piece integrates open-source, physics-based gaming engines in Flash with our own gesture-based interactive system that uses the Microsoft Kinect as an input device. The installation allows and encourages viewers to interact with the projected elements by moving their hands and bodies in a natural way. The projected “planet” view exhibits visual and behavioral changes over time and “evolves” as human technology and industrialization advances. Viewers can play with these “ecosytems” to change them in various ways. The piece itself loops and metaphorically creates a conundrum about humanity’s long-term relationship to the earth.

Long View. Gesture-interactive installation, © 2013 Patrick FitzGerald.

It relates to the SIGGRAPH 2013 Art Gallery theme XYZN: Scale in that it covers vast epochs of time and creates different experiences depending on viewers’ proximity to the projection. We are interested in creating interactive systems and experiences that are intuitive and require no learned grammar. We believe that in the future, gesture-based interactive spaces and experiences will become a common way for individuals and groups to interact with media, environments, and each other.