»The Living Room« 
Light Box
Light Box
© 2001, Christa SOMMERER & Laurent MIGNONNEAU
Keywords
Information
(collective) Sommerer / Mignonneau >
»The Living Room«, 2001 - 2001
Co-Workers & Funding:
ATR Media Integration and Communications Research LabKyoto Japan
programming support: Roberto Lopez-Gulliver
Commissioned by the Bo01 - Living in the Future
Malmö Sweden, May 2001
Technology
Hardware
3 Computers3 Internet connections
1 omnidirectional microphone
1 mixer table
4 powered loud speakers
1 NTSC video quad splitter
3 Video projector
Back projection screen (rigid type)
Installation Requirements / Space
Single square room with one entranceInterface
3 Large scale multitouch screens (4 x 3 meters)3 video cameras
1 omnidirectional microphone
1 mixer table
4 powered loud speakers
1 NTSC video quad splitter
Software
Speech recognition (3rd party)Internet image server (fetching and formatting)
Internet music server (fetching and playing)
Image flow control from speech engine
Descriptions & Essays
"The Living Room" is an intelligent, interactive image, sound and voice environment.
It becomes "alive" and starts to "sense" when users enter and interact with this room.
Like in a perfect surveillance system all sounds, voices, gestures and motions of the users are detected through state-of-the-art camera tracking as well as sound and voice recognition systems. When the various users start to interact and communicate with each other within this room, they will also start to communicate with "The Living Room."
As if it were an intelligent organism, "The Living Room" will react back to the user by interpreting the collected position and speech data in form of images and image elements displayed on the room's four large projection walls. All images and image elements are directly derived from the Internet, they are "The Living Room's" interpretation of the users' interactions and conversations.
Since the users' position, movement and voice data are constantly changing, the images streamed from the Internet are changing constantly as well. Due to the almost unlimited amount of image data available on the Internet, the users will become completely engulfed in this virtual image space of the Internet, displayed as life-streams on the four projection walls. Besides interpreting the users' interactions and conversations visually, "The Living Room" also uses these data to generate and broadcast its own sound and voice output.
Conceptually "The Living Room" thus metaphorically plays with ideas of surveillance, detection, intelligence, interpretation, miss-interpretation and communication. To the users it provide a feeling of immersion into a constantly changing and dynamic data space, full of unpredictable images, sounds and voices.
CHRISTA SOMMERER & LAURENT MIGNONNEAU
Literature
Exhibitions & Events