Credits
Principal: David Rockwell
Design Team: Joshua Walton, James Tichenor, Keetra Dixon, Brett Renfer,
Adi Marom, Tucker Viemeister, Zack Boka, Lars Berg, Ellen Haller, Chris Allick
Projection Equipment: SenovvA, Inc.
Commissioned by Zero1 and The City of San Jose




The platforms placed throughout the San Jose City Hall plaza function as both stations for interaction and representations of various civic activities. Visitors can jump on a hopscotch court, shout into a megaphone, or use digital services such as Twitter or Flickr to create content. Each of these interactions prompts a different virtual reaction on the projected façade that accumulates at the upper building levels in a rolling cityscape. This final cumulative step serves as a dynamic representation of the activity at City Hall.




The LAB wrote custom software in openFrameworks, C++, and GLSL for the projected content, and used Processing to develop software for interfacing with the sensor network. The sensors were created using funnel.cc’s Arduino Fio, XBee wireless transmiters, and an Arduino shield that the LAB developed based on Adafruit’s Wave Shield.

We created an augmented game of hopscotch at Eyebeam in New York to celebrate the launch of our TSPS software and the press announcement of our Plug-In-Play installation at the 2010 01SJ Biennial.

TSPS is an opensource Toolkit for Sensing People in Spaces developed in openFrameworks. In this installation, we used it to track people from an overhead camera, and then transmit their locations to a LAB-created hopscotch app (the projected imagery). Read more and download the beta at openTSPS.com.

Download TSPS and example projects at openTSPS.com

TSPS was developed in Openframeworks for use in design, prototyping, and installed systems.

The basic structure is a server client model with the server sending OSC, TUIO, or TCP info to a client which could be in oF, Processing, Flash, PD, Max, etc. (anything that can listen to OSC). We plan on using this for retail, fine arts installations, rapid prototyping, educational workshops, and providing the source openly for use in production. It builds on the backs of giants and our hope is that we can contribute ways to make it easier for beginners to explore computer vision while also providing a framework for experts to build off of. Part of our goal is to provide quality over quantity of options in terms of the data sent out.

TSPS was started as a collaboration between the LAB at Rockwell Group and the LABS at IDEO. It began as an initiative between Dave Vondle (IDEO) and Joshua Walton (LAB at Rockwell Group) with many of the key components generated through the hard work of James Tichenor, Brett Renfer, and James George who in turn also used components from the openframeworks community, who in turn built upon many open source projects.

Special thanks to the teams that develop Openframeworks, OpenCV, and the many individuals who are all working on creating better computer vision systems.

Upstairs, we transformed the reception desk into a large projection visible from the street. Downstairs, we created two different interactive kaleidoscopes. For the first, we made a small tube-shaped table that refracted objects placed upon it into the projected pattern. In the second location, we placed cameras in the space, turning the kaleidoscope inside out and transforming images of the guests into the kaleidoscope.