Creative thinking on shadow play

Fluid | Fancy Liquid User Interface Design

Final Concept
Sharing a smile with a stranger!
The goal of Fluid is to connect people using shadows as the medium. Fluid is a experience system that does not require interaction from the user, the user is not aware of the system from the beginning. Places where Fluid can be integrated are places like the waiting areas at train stations, meeting places with bored people and not so crowded so the shadows are visible.

Fluid uses lights to take away the users shadow and then replaces it with an artificial one. Unware of this the user will not be aware that he/she is participating in Fluid. As soon as two or more shadow casters are in the Fluid area their shadows will start interacting with each others based on a set of rules described in the technical design. The way the shadows interacts is first by moving around the shadow caster they belong to so that they are facing another shadow. After that they starts streching towards each other.

As the shadows connect they will start glowing in the parts that connects. The longer they stay connected the more will the two shadows morph into a oil like substans and the glow will increase and spread in the shadow. If the owners of the shadows moves away of each other their shadows will try to stay connected depending on how long they have been connected and how morphed they are. As soon as the shadows disconnects they will slowly turn back to normal shadows. When the connection ends, the lonely shadows return.

User Scenario
It’s 4 in the afternoon and Gunter is walking into the station hall of Utrecht Central Station. He is looking for the meeting point where he has to meet his Swedish friend.
Its a quit afternoon and there are a few diffrent people waiting. He walks into the meeting point area and isn’t aware of his normal looking shadow.

Gunter stops walking and looks at the arrivals board and looks around if he sees his friend yet. At a sudden point Gunter notices that his shadow is circling around him and is a bit surpised. He looks around and notices that there are more shadows starting to move around. Slowly his shadow is growing towards a beatifull looking girl 4 meters away from him.

The girl (Eva) already noticed this move also and they smile at each other.
As soon as the shadows hit each other they notice a pink glow starting at the connection point. Eva laughs and moves a bit, the shadows disconnect and Gunter move forward so the shadows connect again. The glow grows and Gunter starts a little conversation about this rather weird experience. They are both surprised by this experience and tries to play with it. They start moving and their shadows morph into something like an oil stain. They swing their arms around and it seems that the more they move the more the oil stains get diffent shapes and grows.

John has been looking at this little play and decide to join in. He walkes toward Gunter and Eva and suddenly his shadow connects as well. They are dancing on a big oil stain like shadow and enjoying it a lot. While they have been so busy enjoying themselfs their friends have arrived and walked up to Gunter and Eva. Their shadows merged into the other ones aswell and a nice connection is being created by the shadow. After a short chat they decided to go and have a drink in a bar and Gunter and Eva switched phone numbers. After many dates they married three years later and now they are living in a nice house with their two kids. Happily ever after....

Storyboard
Storyboard showing Fluid in action.

Gunter is waiting for his swedish friend. He is looking at the arrival board.
He is suprised when he sees his shadow move. When he looks around everybodies shadows are moving.
Gunters shadow connects to the shadow of a beautiful girl and starts glowing. They talk about it and laugths.
Sven wants to join in and as he approaches his shadow merges with the other two.

After a short conversation they say goodbye and split up. Their shadows tries to stay connected as long as they can.

Shadow Storyboard
The Storyboard explains the morphing of the shadows.

Participants have a normal shadow.

The system detected two persons and their shadows start to morph.

The shadows are growing towards each other.

The original shape morphs into a fluid liquid shape.

The two shadows meet and connect. A glow starts to grow from the middle.

The fluid shadows change form like a fluid substance to trigger the participants to get closer to each other.

The participants are connected and chatting away when the system detects a third person. His shadow slowly moves towards the two others to join in.

The shadows created a connection between the participants and their having a great time enyoing this beautifull experience. More connections on diffrent spots are being created.

Moodboard

Technical Design
The whole floor is a huge tiled colour display with integrated sensors for infrared (IR) light detection. The lighting in the room has to be very diffuse and balanced that no real shadow is visible. Additionally there is an IR point light source, which casts directional light on the floor to be detected by the IR sensors. Persons and objects block the light and the system can detect the IR shadow of people and replace it with artificial shadows on the floor display. Because the system “knows” the position of the shadow and the direction of the IR light source, it can calculate the position of the people and their movement vector. With this information the distance between people can be measured and the system can decide which shadows are going to be connected.

Shadow Behaviour
Depending on how many people there are in the area, the system chooses a threshold for the distance between people (the more people the lower the distance). When the distance between two or more people is within this threshold the shadows move towards each other and begin to morph into one merged animated shadow. When people move inside the threshold area the merged shadow moves with them, when they walk outside the area the shadow first stretches then it looses connection and snaps back to the shape of the real shadow. How long the shadow stretches before it disconnects depends on how long it was connected. During the time the connection lasts the colour of the shadow changes and it starts to glow. When another person comes close to the merged shadow it moves a little bit towards the person encouraging the people to get connected.

Hardware
The screen/sensor, a Graphical Input Output Module (GIOM) has square cells that are divided into four sections, IR-sensor, red, green and blue light emitters. A glass layer floating on a layer of silicon protects the GIOM physically and a backlight improves the intensity of the colours of the GIOM and eliminates the rests of the real shadows. Each tile is connected to a computer, which processes the input and calculates the output. To separate the shadows of people and objects cameras with an infrared filter detect the body temperature of the humans and deliver the information to the computer.

Notification System Design
We spended much time on brainstorming about notification systems. Because of the public area and the fact that people that do not want to be a part of the experience must be able to be there we could not use anything that made more people aware of the notification. Thanks to the limitation we came up with three new systems. We have not had the time to investigate how people will react to the different systems and there for we only use the glow notification system in the concept.

Glow Notification System(GNS)
GNS is based on the GIOM technology. When the shadows merge they start to glow. A person standing in the Fluid area will sooner or later see the glowing from his/her own shadow or somebody elses and become aware of the shadows. The beauty of this technic is that we do not introduce a new sense.

Vibration Notification System(VNS)
By dividing the floor in many small GOIM cells we can vibrate them so that we can notify a person by vibrating the tile the person is standing on. The good side of this system is that people will look down on the floor but the downside is that people might find it irretating.

Silent Notification System(SNS)
Using pointed microphones and speakers we can take away the sound in an area, by recording the sound of the surroundings, inverting the sound and play it back. In that way we can notify a person by making the surroundings quite for a few seconds. The possible drawbacks of the system is that silence can be scary, especially for people with bad eyesight and that silence does not make you face down at the floor.

Analysis of people and places
First we went to Sirkeci Station close to Kadir Has. We sat down and watched the people. What we saw was a quite small station with an open area and a waiting room. We were more intressed in the open area because it was more like the area we were all thinking of. Sitting there we saw that people followed a pattern. They went and bought a ticket and then they went to the train or sat down on one of the benches at the open area or in the waiting room. The benches in the waiting room was placed so that you saw the back of the person in front of you. In the open area the benches streched around two pillars, so that you could rest against the pillar, that way you do not need to look at other people waiting. Even thought people were sitting next to each other they did not make any contact. We started talking about how the station would be if Fluid would be installed. We belive that the children would start playing with it and in that way make the adults talk with each other about it and in that way create a connection.
Sirkeci Station seemed to small for Fluid so we took a boat to Haydar Pasa Station. Here we could once again see that the station did not have a real meeting point and that people bought their ticket and went to the train. We concluded that train stations in Turkey are different from those we have seen in western europe and that the turkish people seems to use trains differently then western europe. Therefor we think that Fluid would work better in another train station were people waits in the station for some time and there is a real meeting point for people waiting for others.

Interactive Demo

This interactive demo shows the envoirement where Fluid will take place, the setup and a wicked stopmotion animation of the shadows behaviour. Click the image for the big size popup.