by Yunjeong Jang(Yunny)
“Inside manus” is interactive digital artwork using leap motion. The concept of this project refers to a new ecosystem created by the artist. It opens up a new dimension of the biological system inside the hand. Each creature performs specific functions, and some of them are connected to each other. (This story is not related to scientific facts.)
There is a different dimension world inside our hands, this world is invisible with human’s eyes and can not be detected by any artificial materials. There are four types of main characters in this world, all creatures fulfil the obligations they are given those are acted as an assistance of our body function.
Flowy(Red particles on the periphery)
Flowy prefers to keep distance to the hand. When the flowy perceive the movement of the hand, it starts to make blood flow go on smoothly.
Watchy(Blue cube in the centre)
Watchy is a supervisor. Watchy wanders around the other elements to check if they carry out their duties faithfully. For an accurate observation, it can transform itself to smaller, bigger.
Moveedic(Orange triangular lines)
Controlling hand movement is one of the important roles of Moveedic especially fingers. It helps the hand to move properly. Moveedic looks just straight lines but when they work, its shapes are changed to curve lines as finger shapes. It follows fingers movements and shapes. But it’s hardly perfect to all aspects of the movement.
Opposy(Black lines)
The main purpose of the existence of Opposy is keeping balance to prevent to lean to one side. And this is the reason why we can equilibrate. Opposy is closely related to the moveedic. The biggest flaw of moveedic is instability so the Opposy compensates the defect. It always moves entirely opposite method to moveedic. For example, when moveedic move to downside right, the oppose shifts to upside left.
Inspiration
When I decided to create the new ecosystem, the universe has come up with my brain at first especially the shape of the Andromeda galaxy and black hole. In addition, I wanted to express satellite and meteorites so those are appeared by Flowy and Watchy. Also, I am inspired by real veins and structure of the human body and those result in the curve lines called Opposy. About my fairytale, I have been influenced by “Book of Imaginary Beings(Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero and published in 1957)”.
Aims
For technical aspect, this is my first time to handle the leap motion myself. I desired to understand how leap motion works following the code and which part of codes make leap motion be activated. Then, I put primitive objects to 3d dimensions of leap motion. Thus, I studied the principle of leap motion codes and adapted so I fully achieved my first technical goal. For my coding aspect, I have tried to make my own code from the beginning to the end. Even I had a difficulty generating complicated shaped codes, I did my best what I could do and I have felt that I improved a lot myself in terms of coding skill while I use that method. Frankly, I have accomplished my initial aims to some extent. Having said that, for my future project, I want to create more complex and more precise a new ecosystem.
Reference
[1] https://github.com/genekogan/ofxLeapMotion2
[2] “Book of Imaginary Beings” written by Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, published by Fondo de Cultura Económica (1957); Dutton (1969)