Shadow Touch! Media art that fools the senses

Shadow Touch! Media art that fools the senses

Shadow Touch! by Teruaki Tsubokura

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ8fbp4b3Jw

“We began our research because we wanted to eliminate the distinction between real and digital objects.”                                         -  Teruaki Tsubokura(坪倉輝明)

 What is Shadow? A sign of fear? A symbol of darkness? Or lack of light purely?
Can you imagine that you can play with shadow by moving your hands? Is it possible?

Shadow seems to be mysterious and untouchable. It was inspiring and I started thinking what is the nature, function or meaning of it. In a certain extent, shadow is the evidence that something exist in the world. In Shadow touch!, it is creepy that shadow is shown but there is no any object on the top of the shadow.

Let’s take a look into this interactive media artwork called “Shadow Touch!” exhibited at the 14th Japan Media Arts Festival as an award winner in the Student CG Contest created by Teruaki Tsubokura.

  

       Teruaki Tsubokura is an dancer, visual jockey, media artist ,web programmer, interactive media art and augmented reality (AR) developer, graduated from Kanazawa Institute of Technology .

Shadow Touch! uses a Wii remote control, infra-red camera ,projector and recursive reflector, as a media technology to play with shadows and make people confused.

While the audience uses the flashlight to search for shadows on empty floor, “playing” with shadow is no longer a dream, by touching ,holding and throwing them.

Of course, these flashlight-like devices did not use real light. The infrared camera from a Wii remote is installed. It detects directions it’s facing by using recursive reflectors, which are able to reflect light back the way it came. Therefore, “Shadow touch!” generates video (or series of photos) at the same time with the motion of the camera and shows the so-called “shadow” using a projector.

After attaching recursive reflector caps on the fingertips, users are able to hold and change the motion of shadows on ground. Actually they reflect infrared light; also the Wii remote control would catch and detect the position of reflected lights.

Indeed, by the video on YouTube, shadows projected on the ground are not really real enough to fool our vision. As the intensity of the image produced by Shadow Touch! is not that high compared with the real shadow in dark environment, this technology needs more improvement and development. Other thing is that there is few delay occurred during the processing of holding and throwing shadows. But anyway those problems are technology-based and can be solved in coming day.

« We began our research because we wanted to eliminate the distinction between real and digital objects. And we thought it would be interesting if we could do that by using digital versions of shadows, which are very familiar objects. As a form of content, this technology needs more development. So we’d like to produce shadow models for various objects, and create a version that several people can play with together. » Teruaki Tsubokura said. With no doubt, this interactive artwork is meaningful. As an augmented reality deceives, it raised up a question, in what extent people can reduce the distinction between real and digital world?

Shadow does inspire people. According to Socrates, “physical objects and physical events are « shadows » of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves”. It also made the root of famous Metaphysics(形上學).The Republic is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato, was a  Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, by using metaphor of Sun, fable of prisoners in cave in order to promote his point of view towards Metaphysics . The fable is about a imaginary case that prisoners are living in cave and facing to wall due to limitation of movement (they are trapped and not able to move their head) ,as the assumed only source of all the information they could obtain from the world is the shadow on the wall, they don’t know there is a Sun and sky outside .This revealed that if someone never know the truth that shadow is the only projection of something ,they might think that these shadow are real and concrete object as shadow composes the world. Shadows are really interesting and deeply meaningful to culture of human.

Shadow is the evidence of something exists.
Shadow is the projection of object.
Can you imagine that we could control the real shadow?

Zachary Ip

http://teruaki-tsubokura.com/profile.php  (Website of Teruaki Tsubokura)

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