Caged Thoughts
Brief
Caged Thoughts is an AR installation attempts to expose the invisible thought cages we've built around ourselves, and it is a counterpart of the The Invisible Bird project.
Ideation
The Invisible Bird project allows people to guess whether Twitter's attitude about a certain topic is positive or negative in general by asking them to feed an invisible bird representing a specific Twitter topic. To compliment this idea, I built Caged Thoughts to present Twitter's attitude about a hidden topic by lighting up an empty bird cage with green or red color. Then, to reveal what the topic is, the user will need to use AR to see what's inside a "positive" or a "negative" cage.
The idea of revealing AR objects through tiny physical objects is drawn from an art piece of animated people sleeping on different hand-sized beds by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, called DESCENT.
Prototype & Building
I built a prototype to testify the size & physical structure of the fabricated cage, and what is the best way to incorporate an AR target image into the cage body.
- A laser-cut foam board cage was built to verify the specifications of a full-arcrylic cage;
- Illustrator drawings were adjusted according to foam board prorotype;
- Instead of putting the AR target onto the interior pillars of the cage, embeding it as part of the base patterns of the cage worked the best for the overall aesthetics
On top of the physical structure, A-Frame based AR were used to present 3D objects of different topics.
Since the AR target marker was placed inside a physical cage, it was at first problemetic for a hand-held device to reconginze it, since the structure of the cage blocked the marker from being recogonized.
To get around, I ran a few comparison between different sizes, pattern ratios and placement for the marker, and eventually landed on an optimus combination of the three.
Then, Google Poly-based 3D assets were prepared and incorporated into the cage, so that they can be synchronized with the changing of lights that was initiated via serial communation between the Arduino board and the laptop.
Demonstration & Future Works
Given a certain topic, if the cage is red, it means the public's attitude about it is mostly negative; if the cage is green, it means the public's attitude about it is mostly positive.
In the video on the right, people's attitude on Twitter about four topics are revealed as follow: positive about legalization of marijuana, negative about trade war, positive about death penalty, and finally, negative about gun control.
This project is still in progress. Future works will be focusing on the scaling and synchronization of large amount of cage duplicates, revision of base patterns, and animation of 3D assets.
Credits of 3D assets: Google, VR XRTIST (XRTIST), Evol Love, Robert Mirabelle