Line Describing The Body is an homage to Anthony McCall᾿s classic piece, Line Describing A Cone, in which a simple white circle is projected into a smoky room created a physically-tangible conical beam of light extruding out from the projector.
I wanted to recreate the wonder, joy, and delight that McCall᾿s audience experiences when they play in his light cone, but for a modern-day interaction-hungry audience. Rather than simply projecting a circle, the piece uses a Kinect 3d sensor to project the outline of the viewer back onto them in real time. Because of the fog, this projects a tangible form into the space; extruded from the tiny projector lens out to the outline of the viewer᾿s moving body.
It᾿s impossible to capture on film, but in a sufficiently-foggy room, the piece puts the viewer in a sort of personal light tunnel. Viewers love the feeling of manipulating their smoke tunnel, shaping and deforming it through gesture and shadow. The way the tunnel diminishes towards the brightness of the projector᾿s lens evokes to many viewers something one might see in death.
To accomplish this, I made a simple, extensible c++ app to read incoming data from the Kinect, calibrate the kinect-space with the projector-space, and output (via Syphon) either an outline, for the fog piece, or a solid blob that can be used to mask realtime video onto a moving target.