Gestural Drawing: An Interactive Experience

Inspiration

As designers, we see how art can transform our way of thinking and evoke emotions. Taking inspiration from Artechouse, we observed how standing at a particular place generates data points on the screen. There was no touch involved. We were also interested in TeamLab and their works incorporating nature, and thus we strived to incorporate organic patterns into our project. We delved deeper into the concept of interactivity, exploring various ways to interact with the screen. We sought that inspiration to create artwork using gestures to alleviate stress in our prototype.

What it does

In our prototype, the machine seeks an audio command that will take in the keyword "I am stressed". Based on the audio input, you will be taken to a new screen that forms noise waves in slow motion which creates a soothing sight for users who are feeling stressed. The user can manipulate how fast the noise wave can travel based on the hand gesture. When the user moves their hand to the right, the waves increase the speed and slow down when the hand is moved to the left. Additionally, we thought of potential other patterns for other emotions here

How we built it

We have used p5.js primarily in which we have incorporated the p5 library ml5.js. This library serves as a machine-learning model that performs various lightweight machine-learning functions. For our project, we used hand gestures where the model identifies data points of the hand. Based on the points, we tracked the hand movement of the user.

Challenges we ran into

Incorporating video into our canvas and bringing every instance of the code into a single product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite having less coding experience, we are elated by the fact that we could take the risk to develop the codes to make artwork interactive in a fun way. Through this, we learned new libraries and functionalities that would be beneficial for our future; specifically, utilizing the user's hand position to affect the screen in real-time.

What we learned

Stepping out of your comfort zone can bring you many opportunities that could be a learning experience. We did the same thing in our project and came up with amazing interactive art! This allowed us to explore various methodologies that could bring art to life. Never have we thought we would use our hands to sketch without touching the screen!