In this "OpenShare", I've branched out a little bit from one of my previous projects named " The Screen Boundary", in which I was focusing on the relationship between the digital world and the physical space, and I've questioned the boundaries of the digital world. Here I used machine learning-object detection techniques to track the movement of objects captured by WebCAM and visualize the Motion data through a series of graphics. The squares symbolize (the screen) boundaries that highlight the connection between the digital screen and physical paper. Four different colors distinguish different motion Trails.

The Screen Boundaries

We spend so much time on screens, doing works, watching videos, playing games, making video calls… it seems we can do anything with this “magic flat box” which contains the compressed version of our real physical world. Human designed it and it’s a form that only human and intelligent animals could understand(excepts its same kind of devices), it displays Graphic images composed of pixels and gives them constant change, the image gets bigger or smaller, we default to it being closer or further to us; images appear or disappear, we assume that things are there or not there. However, there is still a gap between what’s shown on screens and what’s in the physical world, one of the main reasons is that the screen is hard, flat, and limited in size and shape. Projection could help somehow, and interestingly enough, with the different objects beings used to project on, the shape of the screen can be very flexible. Because the screen has a definite shape, therefore it is bounded. In this project, I attempt to find a way to break the boundaries of the screen in the physical world. Paper is the material I choose to use, as it has similarities to screen(or it could be projected as a screen), the original shape of paper and screen are both quite basic, flat, and squared, but the former shape can be changed easily by simply cut or fold because it is soft. Assuming the screen is soft, how should the boundaries of the image be defined？this would not be simply called up and down, left and right.

In this interactive piece, the position of the person(relative to the screen)captured by the webcam is detected in P5.JS. The real-time motion trajectory data influences the motor controlled by the Arduino, which controls the motion of the paper and constantly changes the shape of the paper.