Playpen

Battery hens flap to help battery hens in the Flap to Freedom installation that Chris O’Shea and Icodesign created for the V&A Village Fete to support freedom for farmed chickens.

Contestants flap their arms and their chicken moves in sync. Quickest flapper wins the highest place on the pecking order. More over at the Icodesign site.

There are also Flickr sets showing the build process and the chickens in action.

Chris has also posted more details about the Flap to Freedom project as well as a bit of technical how-it-was-done.

For someone like me who is always interested in getting people to act playfully (dare I say stupidly) via interactivity, this is pretty hard to beat. They’re so into the activity, they take the technical ‘magic’ for granted, which is how it should be. I especially like the way the music eggs them on (sorry).

Bet you that music sticks in your head for the rest of the day too.

(NOTE/UPDATE: I thought I’d posted this whole thing before, but it was on draft for some reason, so I’ve combined the two posts).

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Seth Sandler, one of the students that snagged a Google Summer of Code place at the Natural User Interface Group, is developing a port of NUI’s multi-touch tracker, touchlib, over to openframeworks (which will mean you won’t have to feed it all the data viaTUIO through OSC.

I haven’t had a chance to really play around with OF much yet, but I keep seeing a lot of nice work that does.

Perhaps you guys can let the rest of us know whether Seth’s port will be a time-saver?

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Let’s face it, all Australians are dangerous on the sports field, but the the Australian Museum has a new interactive installation called Dangerous Australians that allows you to interact (safely) with Australia’s deadliest top ten creatures. The saltwater crocodile, funnel web spider, box jelly fish, brown snake are among them. Via the six-metre long interactive table you can explore what happens if you encounter them and what should you do to survive.

The installation was created by Lightwell under the technical direction of ex-COFA and ex-Fabrican Dave Towey. The whole thing is running under OS X and coded in Cocoa/Objective-C++ with a bunch of open source libraries including Ogre3D, OpenFrameworks and OpenCV (computer vision for the tracking).

Thanks to the Objective C++ it looks like it runs extremely fluidly and fast. For me, it’s interesting to see how the interactors act and react. The children use really quick jabs at the ‘buttons’, as if they’re trying to test the interface and its affordances. But the bit I love most of all is how the person with their hand in the ‘water’ snaps it away in reflex to the Great White Shark that suddenly appears (around 0:50 in the video).

More images and details on Lightwell’s page - and take a look at their other work whilst your at it.

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