Skipping stone
Made for the Umeå Autumn light festival this interactive light installation attempts to recreate the distant summer feeling of skipping stones over water.
The festival runs for about two weeks in the late autumn with an unpredictable mix of ice, rain and snow. The installation is outside and accessible night and day and therefore designed for these conditions.
The digital effect of the bouncing light had to communicate the illusion of a skipping stone and the physical form had to invite to interaction.
A small scale model was made to prototype the interaction and display for the application process.
Key reflections:
This installation tries to abstract the skipping stone feeling to a light installation. How was this to be communicated to the user with an unmanned installation in the middle of a public park?
The form of the object containing the sensors to detect a 'throw' was strongly dictated by the constraints of the enviroment. The sensors could, for example, not be placed under the glass as any snow would disturb the reading.
Because of this, the way to encourage interaction with the object was done through the lights themselves. A sequence was programmed with a play between the sensor object and the trail of lights to invite the user and indicate that the sensor object could cause a change.