Slip Through Your Fingers - A CROSS-BOUNDARY & INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION

‘Slip through Your Fingers’ is an installation project that aims to provide audiences with an immersive experience of exploring and sharing memories.

In this project, memories are turned into a variety of colored bubbles slowly floating across the screen and gradually blending into the surrounding physical environment through light projection. The two different media, digital screen, and light projection divide the installation into two parts: the memory we attended, and the memory we lost. Viewers can grab, move, or enlarge memory bubbles on the main digital screen through hand gestures, indicating how we attend to sensory inputs and turn our perception into memories. However, as memory bubbles float across the edge of the digital screen and move into the light projection, the bubbles become non-interactive, indicating the loss of memory.

Technology

Year

Processing, Python, Leap Motion

2021

Why This Project?

I was born in a time when there was no time for reminiscing. For the past few years, I've been trying to become the person that the world wants me to be, following existing social norms, planning for a future that is too far away from the present and pushing myself to keep going forward without asking why and how. In retrospect, I've neglected a lot of things that were once very important to me. Thus, I hope people can stop by this installation and take some time to browse through other people's memories and leave their own stories. I hope this installation can give people who live a fast-paced life every day an opportunity to reminisce their past, write down their present, and let all the precious memories stay longer in their minds.

Proof Of Concept

Memories are intangible and formless. But if we were to give memory a form, what would it look like? In this project, I choose to use bubbles as the physical form of memories because everyone's memories are as colorful as bubbles in the sun. But at the same time, most memories are evanescent, lasting for only an extremely short amount of time, and the memories that can enter our brain at the conscious level are only a small portion of what we actually feel. Thus, the fragility and brilliance of memory are the aesthetic theme of this installation and will be represented in the form of bubbles.

I created an interactive prototype in Figma and implemented the demo with Leap Motion Sensor and Processing to testify my idea.

Screen Shot 2021-01-31 at 11.55.44 PM.png

How to Interact with this installation?

Gesture Controlled Interactions: The installation is controlled by people’s gestures detected by a Leap Motion sensor. When people try to catch the bubble and hold it in tight, the bubble shakes and becomes larger so people can start to see the details of the memory hidden inside the bubble. When the person releases the bubble, the bubble quickly escapes and flows out off the screen and becomes inactivated as it flows out of the main screen.

Voice Controlled Input: Users can control the content of the memories displayed on the screen and upload their memories into the projection area through voice input. I chose to use voice input instead of the keyboard because voice input would make the whole experience more immersive. Just imagine you are talking to an old friend about the most precious memories. The voice is then converted to texts by a voice recognition program. The texts will be then used as keywords for searching memories or be directly uploaded to the projection area based on the user’s interaction.

Final Installation