Home > Installations > Little Magic StoriesLittle Magic Stories
Bringing the imagination of children to life through storytelling, performance and technology.
This installation aims to encourage children to use their creativity to bring stories to life. It helps to improve their confidence in self expression and develops literacy and speaking skills. The installation allows them to create a performance from within their imagination, on stage, in front of an audience of family and friends.
The use of technology literally brings their drawings to life on stage, allowing them to interact and respond to their creations in real time. By using a holographic projection film; sets, characters and objects appear to float on stage alongside the performers. A camera and custom software track the performers, allowing the scene to react in a playful & more dynamic way.
For children who show disinterest in writing stories and drawing, but love to play video games, this project hopes to inspire them to participate, creating their own immersive worlds that they can be proud to express their own creations through.
think how fast this will become streamlined & smaller... wow
A recent article by Russell M Davies in WiredUk commented that ubiquitous computing will be realized through the 'debasement of technology' -- where expensive computing technologies become ubiquitous through their rapid transformation into cheap available ubiquitous devices. Welcome the Kinect....
See the WiredUK post here:
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/start/russell-m-davies
Excerpt:
"Kinect hacks are coming thick and fast, but here is one that will set millions of PC gamers' hearts a-flutter: A hack that lets you gesture control a game of World of Warcraft.
The tech is coming from the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, where a team has built a toolkit, dubbed the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit, which lets them quickly harness Kinect's various image processing and motion-sensing powers to whatever bits of code they desire. This middleware, with some tweaks, lets FAAST quickly facilitate "integration of full-body control with games and VR applications," via a clever processing server that streams the user's skeleton pattern, including body position and gestures which can be mapped onto keyboard controls.
The code is free for non-commercial use, because the Institute has big plans for it--including simple, medically inspired games for rehabilitation of motor-skills after a stroke, and even for reducing childhood obesity through "healthy gaming" (though, given the wild flailing Kinect-playing requires, the health of coffee tables and trinkets around the world might be in danger)..."