Role: Experience Designer
Schedule: 12 mos. concept to completion
Team: 15, including Brian Eno
My approach to ambient computing comes straight from ambient music.
I think it's the way generative audio frames input and output relative to the composer that helps me understand how to be creative within an ambiguous medium.
A longtime fan of Brian Eno, I've always admired his ability to express complex emotions while exploring brand new mediums and technology. For this project, I put my head together with folks from the creative agency Listen and the Microsoft music and technology program to propose a HoloLens project to Brian and his longtime collaborator, Peter Chilvers.
My dream was to put people in the middle of a generative light and sound experience... And that my team and I, as people behind the medium, might score guru-level insight from Brian and Peter.
I sketched some initial renders of the experience and we worked from there.
I looked at how the interaction and visuals would work for groups of people, allow for commotion, work with projection, and complement physical architecture.
The core mechanic of the piece is so simple that the prototype was also the last.
We placed iridescent sphere that repeated crystalline tones in space.
People sculpted sequences in space, which each became beautiful forests of sounds.
But for Brian Eno, there were three problems which made the effort worth it.
Preserving Intimacy:
How can a communal experience feel as intimate as a personal one?
Composition:
How can we make a soloist into an orchestra?
Conceptual Integrity:
How can we mix the physical and digital seamlessly?
Over the cource of 5 days, XXX people contributed to the holographic performace.
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Images by me.
Other images by Microsoft.