Puff Off

Project brief

The project brief was to create an interactive experience augmenting the capabilities of this light wall installation at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Knoxville. 

The installation shimmers lights in playful aesthetic patterns on the front facade of the library building.

Context Setting

Children of Knoxville and adjacent neighborhoods often visit the library during their evening hours after school. It is a time where study meets play for these kids, and they all engage in craft, reading, doing homework, solving puzzles and anything that catches their cursory attention. 

Concept Inspiration

With a goal to create a simple engaging experience for these kids, I took inspiration from the act of blowing off candles on a birthday cake.

But an interaction that also remains short spanned, yet playful. Hmmm.. we don't want to distract our kids for too long, do we?

On the wall, it would look like

Before,

After kids blew puff of air,

Concept building

To realize this, simple medium of microphone input was used. Using processing's sound and minim libraries, the input audio signal was analyzed to understand distinct puffs of breathe. For this the concept of 'white noise' was used. White noise - When a general voice signal is identified, amplitudes of some frequencies go high and others remain low, whereas when a breathe of air is detected, the amplitudes across all frequencies go high, as shown in the pictures below.

When audio signal is identified (left), when puff of breathe is identified (right)

Interaction

Blowing air into the microphone would turn off the lights of the installation and when blown too hard the lights would fire back on.

When the kids tried this...

The kids played with the interaction on a small scaled version of the light wall.

It was a lot of fun to see kids play with this and invite other kids to try out and compete with one another.

As Anonymous once said,

There’s nothing as gratifying as a child's laughter.

Project video