Recent Royal College of Art (RCA) design graduate David Hedberg's Smile TV is more than a loving homage to the good old 'campfire inside the living room.' Made from an open frame CRT monitor and equipped with a computer vision system, the unsuspecting television set turns the medium's engagement pattern on its head: instead of making you smile at on-screen silliness, you have to "smile to watch." Only when you do - and for as long as you do - will Smile TV reveal its otherwise scrambled broadcast. "This project grew out from experimenting with facial recognition and image manipulation," Hedberg explains over email.
Powered entirely by HTML5 and open
source JavaScript libraries, One
Millionth Tower is loaded with photos and information
from all over the web, and exists in an online environment that is
about as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen
can get.
It exists
in a 3D setting made possible by a tool called three.js, which lets
viewers walk around the high-rise neighborhood. Moving through
allows viewers to see the current state of urban decay, then
activate elements to show ways the residents would change their
world, like an animation showing where a new playground or garden
would go.
The interactive movie is chock-full of photos from
Flickr, street-views from
Google Maps and changing environments fueled by real-time
weather data from Yahoo. Everything is triggered by Popcorn.js, which acts
like a conductor signaling which instruments play at what
times