DESCRIPTION

EASE is a spatial discomfort simulator. It takes place in a black room where sound volume is controlled by the position of the people blindly navigating the space.

CONCEPT

This room also has wall-mounted speakers playing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports at low volume (to put one at ease). People who walk in the room must wear special infrared-emmiting devices on one of their feet. This IR signal is picked up and computed as a position. When two or more people get closer to one another, the volume of the music raises, alerting them that they might collide with one another if they keep their direction. This way, people in the room are aware of the other’s positions in relation to them, but must rely on the music to do so.

EASE refers to the disorientation caused by the amputation of a human sense, as well as the ease-in/ease-out movement expected by people who walk towards one another, slow down, and then walk back in fear of colliding with someone else. It addresses the possibility of not being able to rely on our sight to position ourselves in a given space, the augmented sensitivity of other senses when one of them is amputated and the notion of public (shared with multiple users) and private space (intimate because of the darkness).

TECHNOLOGY

Infrared emitters, webcams and lot of glue. Video tracking was coded from scratch in Processing. The first image of this documentation is a screenshot of the users from a 2D bird’s eye perspective.

PUBLICATION

EASE was showcased for 2 weeks in the EV building at Concordia, in Montreal.