VideoActive

VideoActive is an interactive online parametric design app made for Parameteric Design course led by Marius Watz. Watch is live here.

While visiting in Italy a few years ago, I was in a vineyard where the vintner was playing J.S. Bach to his grapes with the intention that his grapes will resonate with the music in such a way that his wine will taste better or the vine will grow faster. In this work I try to recreate the process, producing parametric shapes instead of grapes.

In this process, a sphere is placed in front of a screen, then a video is played to the sphere. The sphere starts to change its shape as a result of the unique motion in the video it watches. The result is 3D primitives that resonate with the videos they watch.

The resulting shapes are 3D printable, here are some results:

This system is implemented in javascript and lives here. I'm using Three.js to construct and render the interactive scene. While the video is playing an analysis is performed on the video frames, calculating the the motion in the frame. This motion is then mapped to different vertices on the 3D object. Its all about the mapping.