A little introduction

As a technology enthusiast I’ve always had a sense of wonder while watching movies like Marvel’s Iron Man (2008) where technology got to a point where reality would mix with the digital universe. To be honest, this thought was stuck on me since the days of Minority Report (2002) and it’s gesture-based user-interface.

This year (2016/2017) was my last one in college, so I had to choose a subject for my final project to graduate as a multimedia producer. For those who don’t know, we work with photography, video, sound, website building, interactive installations, animation, motion graphics, making games, virtual reality, augmented reality, design… I think you get it. This was a real struggle, seriously! But in all this mess, I wanted to build something that had the potential to be meaningful and useful in the future. At first I thought I could do something based on augmented reality as I've done some projects with this technology in the past. But shortly after, I found the holographic projection concept, which amazed me for its huge potential as a display. Since then I’ve been working on projects based on this technique for a whole year, together with a colleague.

Dark Matter

Dark Matter was my very first experience in the field of holographic projections. This project was born as a middle-of-semester assignment while studying Max/MSP, a visual programming language for artists. The idea was to create a system that could control video and audio samples in real time, using smartphones as user-interfaces. Besides that, we had to use the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol to share information between smartphones and computers via wifi. This was the perfect opportunity to try and validate this concept, and so this was the result.

Music: Professor Kliq - Satellite

What sorcery is this?

Dark Matter is based on Pepper’s Ghost illusion, which was popularized in 1862 by John Henry Pepper. And yes! All those “holograms” you see in concerts are based on this technique (examples: Gorillaz, Tupac Shakur). Nowadays this method is also used as a publicity tool to attract new customers due to its curious effect. On this context, I believe that Holus and Realfiction are great references with different positions on the market.

The concept

This project focuses on the relationship between nothingness and matter. This way, we wanted to give the users the feeling of being in space, hence the name Dark Matter. This concept was chosen to justify the absence of light in the room (due to technical reasons) so the user could experience the installation to its fullest.

Features

Audio App

In this app, the user is able to:

• Mix different audio samples in real time;
• Change a specific sample's pitch and volume;
• Enable/Disable loops on samples on a specific interval.

Note: You can't hear any of this on the video above since we did not have a microphone to record sound at the time, and the footage audio was not good at all...

Visual App

In this app, the user is able to:

• Switch visuals;
• Change the visual's rotation, position and scale manually;
• Enable/Disable dynamic scaling reactive to the audio sample's amplitude.

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Thank you for reading this post so far!

I really wanted to share this project with you due to my passion about the topic. Since this is my first post regarding the subject, I didn’t want to go in depth on technical stuff due to its complexity. But if you want to, I don't mind sharing with you all the insights I’ve collected throughout this year about holographic projections (technical or not). Otherwise you can expect more content regarding technology, science, psychology and life. Let me know!

I hope you've enjoyed this project!

If you have any questions or feedback, you know what to do!
If you want to know more about me and my goals, check my introduction post.

See you soon,
Shaden