Body Swap
Swap your body with the person next to you.
Have you ever wanted to pull the strings of your friends and family like a puppet? Do you wish you were as small as a child again, or as big as an adult?
This installation transforms your body movements into control of another person. Dance around, jump in the air, do anything you like to make them look silly. However don’t forget, they are doing it to you at the same time.
Two people stand in front of the screen, are captured by the camera and turned into paper cut-out versions of themselves. The images are then swapped, so that you each take control of the other. The aesthetic is of a low polygon 90’s video game. Music plays and prompts you to act out to the audience and each other.
Two players of different height, such as father and son, see a reversal of scale. The youngest magically becomes big, and the adult shrinks to the proportions of the child.
Commissioned by Barbican Creative Learning for the Barbican Weekender Festival 2011, a big thank you to the whole team.
Technical Details
Using the XBox Kinect camera, custom written software in C++ and used openFrameworks, the excellent OpenNI for the full body skeletal tracking, plus a little openCV.
More Media
Pictures on Flickr.
Mar 2011
Videos
