Interactive AR art – Project Gordon
Shannon Novak, artist, West gallery at The University of Auckland; Nick Young, Centre for eResearch
Public art gallery in Dunedin, March 2018
Nick from the Centre for eResearch has been working with artist Shannon Novak to create an interactive AR exhibition – a digital sculpture named Gordon. It was on display in Dunedin public art gallery on the 3rd and 4th of March 2018. The virtual sculpture integrated with IBM’s Watson sentiment analysis tools to interpret speech and adapt its colour to the user’s expressed sentiment.
The viewing public were able to interact with the digital sculpture across multiple sensory modalities. Shannon hopes that the technology could open the door to a new generation of art-lovers, particularly the young people.
The digital sculpture was viewed through an augmented reality headset, which added a layer of digital imagery over the physical, real-world environment whose elements are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information.
With the headset on, members of the public could view the sculpture floating in mid-air inside the gallery, and use voice commands or gestures to interact with it -changing its colour, size, configuration or more.
The viewers can move satellite pieces via gestures, and command Gordon to change color via voice command. Gordon will respond and detect emotion of the users, and change colors accordingly. For instance, if you say something angry, Gordon will turn red, and if you say something sad, Gordon will turn blue.
“You often see them in galleries or at art openings, and all the adults are having a great time … and the kids are just in a corner, on their cellphones, just totally immersed in whatever is on that.” Shannon said.
Project Gordon article was published in Dunedin News.
