The Growth Ring Diary
Art Installation
The Growth Ring Diary is an interactive installation that records one’s undetected emotions, growing toward the light and never-ending; helps people slow down their pace of life to savor beautiful but undetected emotions.
OVERVIEW
4 weeks (2018.09)
Adviser: Danqing Shi
RESULT
2021 Macau Design Award
Participated in the Interaction Art Workshop in SIM at Massart
TERMINAL
PC
Arduino
Processing
Light Sensor
Kinect
CONCEPT
The Growth Ring Diary is an interactive installation which can track your emotion and record your journal.
All you need to do is type or speak your journal
into it and it will gradually spirally appear on the Growth Ring word by word.
After the Growth Ring Diary has grown fully with
your journal sentences, you can savor your
undetected emotions. Your fingertips can move around the Growth Ring Diary at will to enlarge the text.
Additionally, because both human and growth
rings were highly dependent on sunlight to thrive, I embedded a light sensor on the Growth Ring Diary. The color and speed will change based on the light around the environment.
VIDEO
Video duration: 2'18''
INSPIRATION
Tree rings
+
I love to spend time with natural objects, and the yearning of the tree stump next to my home always creates an awe of time.
Diary
+
Occasionally, went through a
previous written journal and read
past feelings from the contents.
Phonograph
Love the phonograph because it
seems to be a sentimental old man,
reading music at a leisurely pace.
I wanted to create an installation that would record my diary and then grow it slowly like an annual cycle.
KEY FEATURE
·TYPE WHAT YOU WANT AT ANY TIME
You can input anything at any time on our platform, which includes your feelings, your encounters,
your thoughts, your creative points, etc. After clicking “OK”, the canvas will then slowly spiral to grow what you have written. You can wander past emotions and amplify them by wandering over what was once written.
·GROWS WITH LIGHT
It grows with the light, the brighter the environment, the faster it grows.
The darker the environment, the slower it grows.
EXHIBITION
PROCESS
·MULTIPLE TRIALS AND ITERATIONS BY USING PROCESSING and ARDUINO
2. Compile the spiral growth
line, random generation
of morphological changes.
1. Sketch
4. Compile the spiral growth characters and lines.
3. Compile the spiral growth characters.
5. Compile the text and lines
that grow in a spiral, with
the lines existing in the
absence of input. The color
gradually lightens from the
inside out.
6. Adjust the overall word spacing and line spacing to solve the problem of lines that are too neat and unnatural.
7. Adapting to different languages such as Chinese character.
8. Light sensors are used to transmit changes in ambient light and control its growth speed.
·COMBINATION OF PROCESSING AND ARDUINO
Processing
Sensor Light
Arduino Uno
Arduino Serial Send
Leap motion
Processing: With the signals from Arduino and leap motion, the processor generates relevant
interaction effects, and outputs the result onto the projectors.
Relevant libraries: processing.video.*, guru.ttslib.*, ddf.minim.*, controlP5.*, processing.opengl.*,
leapmotion for p5.
Leap motion: Used the leap motion as the input device for hand gestures.
Arduino: Used the light sensor on Arduino’s board to detect change of light.
Scene: projector map the effects on the wall and the desk.
FEEDBACKS & IN THE FUTURE
1, Continue to improve and develop the web in the future, creating a larger shared Growth Ring Diary that can hold a variety of people's stories, after which everyone will be able to upload and view content on the site.
2, Continue to add to the national language libraries and make it accessible to more countries.