Seeing and Dreaming

After deciding on what my idea was going to be for the streaming project I began to design and produce it. Firstly I considered what I had available to me in terms of the movement of people through the building. Although the live Arch-OS does include the vision system data, it occurred to me that this was not currently being updated, and the last updates were made in 2008. This meant that I could not use the actual data from Arch-OS at the current time as it did not resemble the movement of people through the building. However I had previously seen video footage of the vision system working and so considered using this instead. This would mean that my production would not be working live, but would give an impression of what it would look like if the vision system was working. It was also relate more closely to the personification of the building as the video is what Arch-OS(the building) sees and then 'dreams' about at night. The vision system footage looks like this:

I considered a number of different ways of manipulating this into an animation to show the movement of people through the building, but concluded that the best option was to draw upon the video and use the motion recognition system but abstract it from the video so that its purpose would be harder to recognise. This would make the animation more intriguing and interesting to watch while being simple and dynamic. I therefore began to build my animation in Flash by copying the red squares from the video and their movement through the atria. This meant that I could then remove the video itself and be left with the squares alone. By removing the relationship between the footage and the squares it makes it less obvious what the data is demonstrating and therefore makes it more abstract. To see the final animation see the post above.