What is the feeling of becoming the wind, an invisible power with a visible physical effect on trees? Will you cherish the leafs, or will you trigger a hurricane? B-Wind!

In the B-wind! interactive installation, users have the opportunity to play an invisible character, the wind, triggering visual effects on the onsite projected footage of the forest and at the remote forest itself. It aims to bridge the physical and the digital world, connecting users to the forests and raising awareness on environmental sustainability
B-Wind! embodies a choreographic approach to raise awareness on nature and the poetry of movement, engaging its public by demonstrating a real immediate interaction effect between their actions and the chosen natural setting. The B-Wind! prototype couples the effects of the participant’s movement with the projected installation footage.

User's physical presence is subtracted from the visual interface, and the result of their actions is presented in the real-time video through emphasized visual effects. The performative potential and the human scale motivate a choreographic approach that raises awareness on the poetry of movement, whereas simultaneously empowering the users by demonstrating a real immediate interaction effect.

The installation is implemented as two connected spaces. One is the projection of a video stream of a remote forest space where the user motion controls the rendering of visual effects. The other, at the remote location, is where software controls wind fans that influence the real trees.
The main challenge is to make this interaction happen in a remote place in a meaningful way. This proposal is connected to the metaphor of Edward Lorenz's “butterfly effect” [Dizikes08], in which the wind waves provoked by the subtle flickering have the “hurricane effect” in a remote place. A prototyped component includes the power to apply the wind effect to the forest – the motion tracking in the installation having a real amplified effect on the real trees and in real-time.

Confronted with such possibilities, multiple questions arise on the user experience: is this pleasant, is it strange? Will the participants “spread the wings” and feel the freedom to cherish the trees? Will they explore the superpower of generating wind? Or, as children, exploding in energy, will they join the celebration of nature without processing causes or consequences – just being?... the wind!

+ info

B-wind! was born in the context of ARTiVIS, a research project with a strong dimension of social and natural sciences, aiming to contribute for the design of a more sustainable world.
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System Architecture

B-wind! [v2.0] interactive installation generic version

+ B-wind! [v1.0] version presented at "AZ labs @ O Espaço do Tempo" exhibition

Working fan prototype | Motion tracking » AZ residency | Part I

B-Wind! live @ O Espaço do Tempo | Exhibition Archive »