Living room has te be taken literally. The sound, light and temperature in the room make your wall come to life.Your room will never look the same.
Together with fellow Angry Man Jeroen van Hofwegen, I created a generative visual that shows the state of your living room. To do this we use the sound, light and temperature as input. We use an Arduino – which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform – to measure the light and temperature. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors. For the sound (amplitude), we just use the built-in microphone of a Macbook.
The state of your living room is projected on your wall. The wall gets filled by organisms that live there in an abstract world. The wall is their habitat. So if it’s dark and there is no sound, some creatures will fall asleep.
The temperature controls the colour of the ambient graphic.
It makes a physical space more interactive, because it responses to some environmental conditions. If the observer starts making sound the wall will look different if it was silent before. If the user opens up his or her curtains the light will affect the wall. It will not only control the organisms, the light also influences the size of several assets.
There are also two additional functions, the user can place a message on the wall (a so-called shout) and it also shows the music that is being played in iTunes.
This project is completely done in Flash. The input from the sensors that are hooked up by an Arduino are send to flash through a protocol called Firmata.
You can experience it live at the Electron in Breda (the Netherlands). From Friday 11th till Saturday the 12th of July. On Friday you are welcome from 11:00 – 21:00 and Saturday from 11:00 – 17:00.
You can also check an online version that uses sliders instead of sensors at levendbehang.nl (‘living wallpaper’ in Dutch).
The shout application can be found here.