




The location
“Jing Hua” was exhibited out door in the botanical garden in Frankfurt, Germany during the light festival LUMINALE 2010. The installation allowed its user freely performing actions, such as tilting, shaking, turning, even knocking. Visitors could explore the actions with aesthetic feedbacks: the animation of flowers and sound of wind chime. Hundreds of visitors showed great engagement and emotional pleasure on interacting with virtual flowers. The appreciation of physical object, digital projection and body movement appeared concurrently.
The concept
The archetype, and also original inspiration of “Jing Hua” was coming from the observation of sieving tea in chinese culture. It is a filtering process by shaking a container. This usually needs two hands to accomplish. The color and texture of tea in the container slowly changes by the continuous and dynamic movement(forces, efforts, and rhythm). The scent of the tea gentlely spread out during the sieving process. a sense of appreciation is evoked by this exchange of body action and physical feedback.
Jing Hua (镜花)
Jing Hua (镜花)
Summary
The project “Jing Hua” is an interactive system sought to bridge the natural environment and virtual aesthetics with help of a tangible object.
“Jing Hua” has an interface in the form of a white oversized bowl, which is embedded with an accelerometer and an Xbee module. A video projector and two speakers are connected to a computer and installed in individual birdhouse which hung up on the branch of a tree. The projector casts the changeable figure of an archetypical flower vertically downwards on the interface. By moving or tilting the bowl, the signal of its position would be transmit to the computer in order to manipulate the color, form, size and structure of the figure concurrently. A sound of wind chime will be generated by the movement of the bowl.