Its developers, Joanne Jakovich and Dr Kirsty Beilharz, wanted to get people to react to digitally generated spatial elements, such as projected imagery and digital sound.
The idea was to create a experience by building a space that responds to movement, Jakovich says. That is what they did with the help of a Macintosh iSight webcam, a Powerbook G4, some speakers and a rear projection system.
The image captured by the iSight is stripped of anything recognisable using the Horn-Schunk method created by Max/MSP and Jitter software tools.
When there is no movement the screen is populated by cellular automata - a bunch of large pixels that bounce about the screen like a special effect in the original Star Trek series.
These pixels are programmed to behave according to a set of rules: if a live cell has two or three live neighbours, it remains alive. If a dead cell has exactly three live neighbours, it becomes alive again.
"Depending on how much you move and where you move, you can destroy or bring cells back to life to create visual and sound effects," Jakovich says.
She was trying to create an aesthetic, to get people to behave in a different way, to be less inhibited. Jakovich is working on a doctorate in architecture.
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