A Moment Likes This

This project is an interactive installation exhibited at "Design Shanghai Festival 2021" from 28 May to 14 Jun 2021.

By Weiting Chi, Wenshu Huang, Xinyue Qiu, Linge Li, Tong Wu, Shinan Liu, Jiawei Yuan

play video

We are an interdisciplinary team of architecture, landscape, and interaction design students; my primary responsibility is to design the human-computer interaction, build the interactive system, and go through the whole with my teammates.

Artist Statement

- Interactive Installation for Design Shanghai Festival 2021

Whether those moments of holding hands and hugging bring momentary heartthrob? And whether you are immersed in those moments that take your breath away for a long time? Life is lonely and dull, and the emotional ties that others bring make it a pleasure. As the saying goes, “Je n'ai jamais pour qui reste, et le coeur qui bat toujours.”

"A Moment Likes This" installation is designed to simulate the human heartbeat and breathing's rhythm with the flickering of lights. When it is calm, the lights also breathe in and out slowly and deeply. When visitors approach, the interactive equipment captures the momentary movements of people in the crowd. And, it presents the inner activity between lovers or relatives as a rapidly changing lighting effect, with colours and rhythms changing. It is often said that love needs to be expressed. Through this interactive installation, we hope to bring out the colourful effects of humans' introverted and reserved emotions in the art installation. The installation will become a new landmark in Xintiandi for nighttime photo-taking to record the passionate or heartfelt moments in people lives.

A Black Box

There is light flowing in the black box

But no one can see the flow of light

Now, people can see the shape of light with the circular holes

When people saw this flowing light, they also entered a magical state. They can hear their heart beating, slow breathing. The light will respond while making the gesture, and people's emotions become part of the light at this moment.

The Physical Structure

The Illuminates

The illumination system of installation chose wall-washed LED aluminum hard light bars. The LED light bars use a high brightness 5050 chip and can be controlled by DMX signals to achieve different lighting effects. The choice of this type of light bar also takes into account:

Fully waterproof
High luminous efficiency, the light source can be washed two meters high
Thickened aluminum bracket, not easy to crush
Fast heat dissipation

The Way of Interaction

The installation system for "A Moment Like This" is divided into two main parts: the illumination system and the motion capture system. The computer host needs to be connected to both systems, one to the Kinect V2 and the USB-DMX512 box. The motion capture system is the input to the system, and the lighting system is the output of the system. The motion capture system uses the Kinect V2 to capture the human skeleton in real-time. A Unity script is run on the computer to determine if the capture is successful, and if it is, the corresponding DMX signal is sent to the lighting strip to illuminate it.

-Motion capture flow chart

The visual gesture builder is used to sample and train the models for the four motion. The skeletal data is captured by the Kinect v2 in real time and transferred to unity as the visitors perform their movements on the Kinect v2. When the similarity between the real-time skeletal data and the model is higher than the threshold set in the unity script, the motion is recognised successfully.

Cat Face motion is recognized successfully

-Four Specific Motions and Lighting Effects

There are four specific motions, each with a specific lighting effect. The lighting effects are designed according to the properties of the four actions, e.g., the heart is a romantic action, so the colour chosen is pink and purple, and the lighting effect changes from slow to rapid to mimic the heartbeat of someone you love.

-Skeleton Movements of the Four Motions

During the recording of the four specific motion samples, each of the samples repeated an action multiple times. kinect v2 recorded the skeletal flow of each motion and, after labelling the samples, went on to generate a specific model to identify the four motion.

System Components

- The Set Up of The Illumination System

- Sampling and Testing for Motion Capture

A Moment Likes This

This project is an interactive installation exhibited at "Design Shanghai Festival 2021" from 28 May to 14 Jun 2021.

By Weiting Chi, Wenshu Huang, Xinyue Qiu, Linge Li, Tong Wu, Shinan Liu, Jiawei Yuan

play video

We are an interdisciplinary team of architecture, landscape, and interaction design students; my primary responsibility is to design the human-computer interaction, build the interactive system, and go through the whole with my teammates.

Artist Statement

- Interactive Installation for Design Shanghai Festival 2021

A Black Box

There is light flowing in the black box

But no one can see the flow of light

Now, people can see the shape of light with the circular holes

When people saw this flowing light, they also entered a magical state. They can hear their heart beating, slow breathing. The light will respond while making the gesture, and people's emotions become part of the light at this moment.

The Physical Structure

The Illuminates

The illumination system of installation chose wall-washed LED aluminum hard light bars. The LED light bars use a high brightness 5050 chip and can be controlled by DMX signals to achieve different lighting effects. The choice of this type of light bar also takes into account:

Fully waterproof

High luminous efficiency, the light source can be washed two meters high

Thickened aluminum bracket, not easy to crush

Fast heat dissipation

The Way of Interaction

-Motion capture flow chart

Cat Face motion is recognized successfully

-Four Specific Motions and Lighting Effects

-Skeleton Movements of the Four Motions

During the recording of the four specific motion samples, each of the samples repeated an action multiple times. kinect v2 recorded the skeletal flow of each motion and, after labelling the samples, went on to generate a specific model to identify the four motion.

System Components

- The Set Up of The Illumination System

- Sampling and Testing for Motion Capture

- On Site Adjustments

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A Moment Likes This

This project is an interactive installation exhibited at "Design Shanghai Festival 2021" from 28 May to 14 Jun 2021.

By Weiting Chi, Wenshu Huang, Xinyue Qiu, Linge Li, Tong Wu, Shinan Liu, Jiawei Yuan

​play video

We are an interdisciplinary team of architecture, landscape, and interaction design students; my primary responsibility is to design the human-computer interaction, build the interactive system, and go through the whole with my teammates.

Artist Statement

- Interactive Installation for Design Shanghai Festival 2021

A Black Box

There is light flowing in the black box

But no one can see the flow of light

Now, people can see the shape of light with the circular holes

When people saw this flowing light, they also entered a magical state. They can hear their heart beating, slow breathing. The light will respond while making the gesture, and people's emotions become part of the light at this moment.

The Physical Structure

The Illuminates

The illumination system of installation chose wall-washed LED aluminum hard light bars. The LED light bars use a high brightness 5050 chip and can be controlled by DMX signals to achieve different lighting effects. The choice of this type of light bar also takes into account:

Fully waterproof

High luminous efficiency, the light source can be washed two meters high

Thickened aluminum bracket, not easy to crush

Fast heat dissipation

The Way of Interaction

-Motion capture flow chart

Cat Face motion is recognized successfully

-Four Specific Motions and Lighting Effects

-Skeleton Movements of the Four Motions

During the recording of the four specific motion samples, each of the samples repeated an action multiple times. kinect v2 recorded the skeletal flow of each motion and, after labelling the samples, went on to generate a specific model to identify the four motion.

System Components

- The Set Up of The Illumination System

- Sampling and Testing for Motion Capture

- On Site Adjustments

​Back to the Top

play video

Back to the Top