Stellar Displacement (Gray Area)

Role: Experience Designer

As part of the Gray Area Creative Code Immersive Spring 2017 cohort, I created Stellar Displacement, an immersive experience designed to recreate the feeling of stargazing, all built from scratch.

Stellar Displacement is a riff on some previous, private work I’ve done that revolves around stars and our relationship to them. Set in a corner of the showcase floor, Stellar Displacement invited guests to sit or lie down on grass (turf) next to a pitched tent and stare up at the pillowy blanket of night sky above them. In turn, each guest was invited to use a special glove that would allow them to connect as many stars as they wished, creating a constellation right there on the spot. After finishing, they were invited to share the name of their constellation, as well as its story, if they had one.

The tech stack used an Xbox Kinect, a short-throw projector, and a custom-built program written in p5.js (written by myself, with assistance from Issac Kelly). The glove controller used small infrared light beacons sewn into the palm (pictured right), attached to a Lithium ion battery, secured in a pouch on the wrist. I did the soldering and sewing myself.