Infrared Water Mark

Peter Ascoli, Yun Jung Jenna Lee, and Wojciech Syta

EID103: Principles of Design

Professor Lima

Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

Upon entry to EID103: Principles of Design's IR Water Mark group, we three were tasked with creating a unique and attractive design to display on the perforated mesh of 41 Cooper Square. After intensively exploring different ideas to display, such as The Cooper Union Logo, displaying The Giving Tree to encourage support for Cooper's financial situation, we finally settled on an interactive design under the guide of our mentors. After the establishment of the aesthetic aspect of our design, we set forth to determine a method of attachement, the correct pattern for a proper LED matrix on the perforated mesh skin, and devise a way to translate motion on the street to the illumination of LEDs. What follows are detailed descriptions of the aesthetic design, its technical aspects, data from tests, and a discussion about the prototype.

Every spring, The Cooper union hosts its End of Year Show (EOYS) to showcase projects from each of its three schools, Art Architecture and Engineering. However, the event is confined to a very small space on campus and is not well known throughout New York City. Our intentions are to draw attention to the school and its EOYS show by creating truly exceptional project that will be appreciated by the public, not just the Cooper community.

To accomplish this goal we plan to utilize both infrared LEDS and LEDs that emit light in the visible spectrum to project the shapes of people walking along the 3rd Avenue wall of the New Academic Building onto its perforate mesh skin using Microsoft Kinect. A project of this magnitude, combined with its interactive nature will attract the public to the EOYS and raise awareness of our institution and its talented community.

The first assignment for Principles of Design consisted of developing several pages of sketches for what the group wanted to design for their project. Almost all of the sketches portrayed static images, varying from The Cooper Union logo phrases protesting The Cooper Unions current financial situation. However, after meetings with a designer at The Tiger Party, we decided to pursue a moving that anyone, that not just Cooper students can interact with.

We want to project the shapes of people on the street onto the west-facing façade of The Cooper Union’s New Academic Building. Shown in Figure 1, as people on the street walk along the New Academic Building on 3rd Avenue, their shapes will be shown on the façade above them. This creates a unique element of interactivity in our design; the users will be unaware of what other people on the street see displayed the building. It will fit right in with the flow of the city; users interact with the design without necessarily having to devote any time or effort to participate.

The “shadows” will be constructed will be constructed using a combination of infrared LEDs and LEDs that emit light from the visible spectrum. The outline of peoples’ bodies will be shown with regular LEDs to serve as a queue for tourists and New Yorkers to take a picture of the building, if they are not already doing so to capture its incredible architectural appeal. Once someone points his or her camera at the building, the sensor will detect the infrared light and the user will experience the second tier of the design. The infrared light will fill in the rest of the body and the intensity of the emitted light will correspond directly to the distance a person is to the building’s ground level wall; the closer that people on the sidewalk are to the building, the brighter the infrared LEDs will be. Figure 2 illustrates the general idea for our design. Aside from serving as a queue to pull out a camera, the decision to incorporate regular LEDs was also because many modern cameras come equipped with infrared filters over the imaging sensors, thus blocking infrared light from appearing in photographs. Since we do not want to limit who can enjoy our design, regular LEDs will be used in addition to the infrared as described to broaden the audience.

Since the goal of this project is to ultimately receive funding, this proposal incudes three scaled ideas of the same design. By scaling the overall theme to different monetary values, it should be easier to receive funding. Consequently, if the school turns down the most expensive design, they can look at the cheaper designs to determine if those designs are economically feasible for the school in this time of financial difficulty. Even though we would hope for the funding of our largest and most ambitious design, the other two options are presented so that they may be put into consideration when we present this project.

The authors of this report would like to thank multiple people for making the exploration of this idea possible. First, the authors would like thanks Professor Lima for the creation of the original idea and assisting in developing their ideas throughout the project. Also, Rafale Chang and Ganesh (Last Name?) at The Tiger Party for their excellent guidance as mentors for the group. Dale Short is additionally to be thanked for teaching the authors the basics of programming the Microsoft Kinect. Lastly, the authors thank The Cooper Union for the education as well as the space, materials, equipment utilized to complete this project.