Wunschbox

2010-12-12

The appropriate translation for our “Wunschbox” would be “the box of wishes”.
It is an interactive installation built by students of the German “Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg” and “Macromedia Hochschule für Medien und Kommunikation”.

Visitors should be reflecting on the following issues:

Am I happy?
What makes me happy?
Happiness is always predicated on desires.
Animate your desires.
Be conscious of your feelings.

The Wunschbox is quite intuitive:

Ten fans are mounted in a row at the bottom of the Wunschbox. While coming closer to the box one fan starts to blow. The resulting air draft makes the notes whirl around inside. Depending on the visitor's position in front of the box, the respective fan turns on: The notes get blown around only right in front of the attendee.

Additional there are distance sensors on top of the box. Every time a flying piece of paper gets detected by those sensors, there can be heard the single tone of a chime. Since there are a lot of notes flying around there arises a totally random melody instead of a single tone – just like the chimes in the video.

Write down your very own desire on a piece of paper and throw it into the box. Now you only need to enjoy while the note tumbles around with the other desires.

For those who want to know how it works:

The area in front of the Wunschbox is filmed by a camera, hanging at the ceiling. Every movement is detected with a framedifference-tracking technique. This is done in vvvv, which converts the tracking-data to an „intensity-map“ for the ten fans. The fans are connected to the computer with two Arduino-Boards.

Ten distance-sensors are also connected to the Arduino-Boards. To each of them we assigned one sample of one note of the chime. The higher the paper gets, the closer it comes to the sensor and the louder is each sample played.

Created by:
Anna Katharina Brinkschulte (Filmakademie)
Julian Jungel (Filmakademie)
Bettina Klein (Macromedia Hochschule)
Vanessa Kuhnle (Macromedia Hochschule)

Lecturers:
Inga von Staden (Filmakademie)
Andrea Hennig (Macromedia Hochschule)
Michael Reichart (Macromedia Hochschule)

Video and Music:
Julian Jungel