P Nash

The Interactive Butterflies project is a installation which explores fun ways of interacting with a computer.

In this installation virtual butterflies are projected on a wall and passers-by can interact with these butterflies and change their behaviour. The experience of interacting with butterflies in this way is intuitive and fun.

The Installation setup: a person, a wall, a camera and projector.

The context for this work spans a couple of my interests: technology, nature (albeit simulated) and people. I think there’s lots of interesting scope of elaborating what people think about technology. I also want to both challenge the convention that playing with technology is only for geeks and make technology more accessible generally. IT is showcased and taught poorly in contrast to the traditional sciences. For example The London’s Science Museum, which has lots of little experiments and games presumably in the name of education, is depressingly low tech. The most high tech experiment was a circuit board where you could wire together a light bulb!

When first exhibiting my butterflies installation to the public I expected an indifference towards the technology and how the butterflies worked, but I was pleasantly surprised. People were interested in the technology so why did I have this expectation? Of course is wasn’t my misconception no! Let’s think about it more abstractly. Popular culture celebrates technology but mostly through a polished and passive consumerism: it’s more common to buy technology than to experiment with it. Is consumerism a barrier making people less creative with technology? Was experimentation with technology more common with our parents, or was it only my dad playing with electronics? Interesting but let’s return to the Butterflies installation.

interaction and simulation

Step 1: Person approaches the Butterflies

The interaction is simple: the butterflies move away from you. The butterflies behaviour is programmed to be scared of you: they quickly disperse and slowly regroup together. This behaviour is only one of interactions the Butterflies are capable of but it’s a simple and engaging interaction.

Step 2: Butterflies react to person and disperse.

The Butterflies are made more realistic by their grouping behaviour, their “flocking”. Creating flocking behaviour on a computer is a relatively new idea and entails a set of rules a computer churns through to make the virtual butterflies look more realistic.

Step 3: Butterflies regroup away from person.

kit

So how does it work? Let’s first inspect the kit needed to set this up. The installation needs a couple of things:

• Laptop – to run the Butterflies simulation,
• Projector – to project the Butterflies on a nearby surface,
• Camera – to record people’s movements.

The interesting bit is detecting people’s movements reliably with a cheap camera. There is, fortunately, a cheap way of making computers interactive. The expensive route is called an ‘interactive white board’ widely used in schools across the UK. Interactive white boards allow people to interact with a computer using special pens to draw on the computer screen and control the computer. The cheap interactive white board uses a Wii Remote as a camera to watch people interacting. The WiiRemote has an infrared camera. Infrared red cameras can only see light sources such as candles and cigarette lighters, but if you’re feeling more creative: some home made LED lights. The WiiRemote tracks the light source and moves the mouse on the laptop.

My installation in Brixton Market used a ‘wand’ to interact with the Butterflies. This wand housed an LED, which was tracked by my WiiRemote, and controlled my laptop and disturbed the Butterflies.