For the PComp midterm, I designed a haunted museum artifact for the Halloween Event hosted by the Graduate Music Theater Writing Program at Tisch. This is the first post of the project, and you can check with the finished project here.
Background
Our initial idea was to create a ghost on the wall that will surprise the museum visitors, and make the museum gourds talk upon visitors’ reaction. After further discussion with Briana, our coordinator from GMTWP, another team will be responsible for making the talking gourds, and we’ll focus on the wall ghost, and create other artifacts that can work with the ghost.
Since we’re using projections to make a ghost in the room, the room itself become the affordance of our project. It is both fun and mind-torturing to test out different combinations of item positioning to really take advantage of the space in the room. And this is very different from what I’ve been working on so far at ITP, where the scope of the projects is mostly constrained on a single piece of work sitting on the table.
Circuit Building
To make a projection that can will pop up unexpectedly, we made a simple circuit includes a distance sensor that will send a triggering single to the laptop if someone places an object close enough to the sensor. Parallel to the sensor, we also put four groups of LEDs in series, in order to create an evil blinking eye artifact that will be triggered once the ghost is projected onto the wall.
Below are pictures and videos showing the building process of this artifact – the Eye of Cthulhu, from prototype to finish.
