Experimental Playground

I visited Experimental Playground today, at the Melbourne Arts Centre.
It was quite a nifty little exhibition of interactive art. As usual with these things, I felt that the artistic descriptions given were sometimes reaching a little far.. but nevertheless, the tech was cool :)

There was a projector system where you put your hands in the beam and flicked your fingers around.. on the projected screen coloured pieces of glass and bubbles would form and bounce off the sides and your hands, making musical noises as they did so.

There was a shadow-puppets system with a difference.. it scanned your silhouettes, and then modified them, adding beaks and fins and fur and hair and so forth to your hand-puppets.

There were (artificial) babies driving giant teacups who listened to MP3s; people could upload different MP3s which changed the way the babies drove.

There were "windows" into a virtual world, and the view changed as you panned or zoomed the window by physically moving it around, and by touching the screen you could effect things that were going on.

Those were some of my highlights, but there were quite a few more exhibits.

Oh, and I was amazed at the patience of the people who had put together a stop-motion-animated version of Pole Position (most popular computer game of 1983). (The performance is also available on Youtube here. See also Space Invaders.
That was non-interactive though.