May The Force Be With You

source: vimeo
Every thoughts and actions that leaves our body, becomes some sort of force or energy and has influence over the world nonstop. “You hit the brakes for a second, just tap them on the freeway, you can literally track the ripple effect of that action across a two-hundred-mile stretch of road.” (Mission Impossible III, Tom Cruise) Like this, it is hard to comprehend how powerful our actions can be. We need to realise that an action has the power to delivered, having psychological and physical impacts. This is the message I wanted to deliver to the audience through this project using one of the most familiar force, gravity.
The signal that is sent from Kinect according to the hand movement, is received by the servo motor and link arm, which translates the signal to mechanical movements to control the angle of the tank and camera in real time. By syncing the position of the hand and the gravitational force, the audience will reminisce of the Jedi’s from Star Wars. But that experience is not direct or shocking, but completely emotional. Most of the people might just end with being slightly amused, but some might end up thinking deeply about “the force”. This is what I ultimately try to address with my work. I believe change can start with a simple experience like this.
The image captured via the camera first goes through image processing in VDMX, and gets sent to MadMapper via Syphon. After that it is displayed on the wall via two projectors. The hand movement data picked up via Kinect is processed with Processing. The x-coordinate value is sent to Arduino Pro Mini via Serial.
The structure is assembled according to the blueprint with various thickness of aluminum plates cut in a CNC machine held together with some nuts and bolts. I used C920 which is a camera with high resolution. The torque of the servo motor is 20kg/cm.