Joseph Unruh

A Project by Joseph Unruh and Jacqui Manzi

Originally created as a project to apply object tracking to lighting, so that colored lights would follow a person as they moved around a scene.

It has since evolved into a general platform for creating modeling hundreds or thousands of lights in a scene and creating a beautiful interactive environment with those lights.

Using the Microsoft Kinect, the platform allows you to build up a 3D model of lights in a scene by recording sections of the scene while a pattern is displayed on the lights. For each section, this pattern allows the platform to match each light address with a specific light in the scene. As long as each section contains lights that overlap with lights in another section, the sections will be merged together into a single 3D model of all the lights in a scene along with the address of each light.

The video below shows how the light detector is used to construct the model. 

Once there is a 3D Model of the lighting, it can be added into the Pattern Builder. The Pattern Builder is a web interface that gives a live visualization of the 3D lighting environment and provides a simple interface to build the interactive environment.

It is used to build groups of lights, patterns and effects that can be applied to those groups, and a timeline for merging those patterns and effects into a full experience.    

Examples of the effects that can be produced are: light sweeps, fades and pulses; audio responsiveness and user interactivity via the kinect. The Kinect allows the environment to react to people moving around in it and user gestures, like pointing.

During Burning Man 2013 we had the opportunity to show a large scale demonstration of Kinetic Spectrum on a 37 foot dome covered in 1,300 lights.