Holocubic Animations in 3D Narrative Space

[Image: From "Don't Trip" by Calvin Waterman].

For his final thesis project at the Rhode Island School of Design, recent graduate Calvin Waterman produced a project called "Don't Trip."

[Image: From "Don't Trip" by Calvin Waterman].

The project "explores the relationship between written prose and illustrated scenarios," Waterman explains, as it zooms into specific spatial episodes in the lives of five characters.

There are thus five specific buttons a viewer can push, each of which corresponds to one of these characters: "When one of the five character buttons is pressed a version of that character's scenario is chosen from a database of possible outcomes." It is a choose-your-own-adventure cube of light, a projection whose contents are partially decided by viewer interest.

[Images: From "Don't Trip" by Calvin Waterman].

Waterman achieves the installation's disorientingly holographic visual effect, as you can see in these photographs, using a white cube inside of another half-cubic projection area in the lower corner of a room; the smaller cube supports a sort of projection inside the projection, amplifying the resulting image's apparent 3D.

That smaller cube is a burning stove in one character's life, an ambulance in another, an ominous train tunnel in another, and so on.

[Image: From "Don't Trip" by Calvin Waterman].

A larger version of this, perhaps installed atop a billboard cantilevered next to the roadway, would be interesting to see, offering pseudo-holographic variations on future signage. Or flip it upside-down and you've got surfaces for virtual ornament on the corners of existing buildings.

The materials used, Waterman says, include MAX/MSP/JITTER, Arduino, a five-button circuit, projector, computer, foam board, 15 thirty-second animations, inkjet prints, and fluorescent light.

Check out a short film of the installation over on Vimeo.

[Vaguely, but not really, related: Urban Greenscreen].