“Gold” is an interactive installation which explores our obsession with super-stardom, and the extravagance that accompanies it. Through a ‘magic mirror’, revel in a world of excess where you are the super-star. Shower in glittery gold, experience almost omnipotent powers as you materialize, morph and dematerialize into pure sparkling gold dust. Immortalize yourself as a shimmering golden statue, before you collapse and fade away.

You can download a PDF with information on the installation here.

An iPhone adaptation of this installation can also be found here.

Gold at the V&A's Friday Late: Digital Design Festival, Decode Lab. February 2010

 (Image (c) V&A Images)

Gold was selected to be shown at the Tent Digital 2009 exhibition as part of the London Design Festival:

The video below is a demo of the visualization.

Technical Information

The installation uses custom software written with C++ / openFrameworks and the open-source OpenCV computer vision library. The software analyzes the video feed from infra-red cameras in real-time and generates 1080p HD output using OpenGL and also creates an interactive soundtrack based on the motion. A lot of the technology developed for the installation has been released as open-source (see http://memo.tv/tags/open_source).

The installation is designed to be scalable and can be output over multiple screens or projectors to create an interactive area of any size.