Walkers

Interactive installation

Walkers is a single purpose interactive installation built by Ján Pernecký and me to support an exhibition of Júlia Jurinová in 2018. We scanned people walking around the exhibition with Kinect and asynchronously processed their point cloud data to be interpolable by matching vertices between scan frames. Finally, we projected the frame interpolations of the collected scans on a wall in slow motion, rendered as particles with CRT persistence post-processing effect applied to make them look ghostly, each visitor leaving an imprint of themselves behind.

Because this was a one-shot project with an extremely narrow scope, the whole creation process took about a week and we threw many of the coding "best practices" out of the window. There was no code review or code sharing, we worked on separate parts (Ján on geometry processing and me on rendering) with just a shared directory on the file system as the interaction API between our programs. Expecting to find a horrible mess, I was surprised when I looked at the source for the renderer program today. It is surprisingly clean and simple, does exactly one thing and does it in a very concrete way, using just the Webglutenfree library (built in-house for previous projects). While not really proud for using Electron as the platform layer (and would probably hand-roll a native platform layer today), it once again worked well.