EWI

Job Role: Creative Technologist (Working For Jason Bruges Studio)
Date: December 2022
Venue: Brentford Train Station

Video By Jason Bruges Studio

EWI is a project in Brentford, London situated in an underpass between the local football ground and the train station. This project uses nodes of 10 lights to reproduce the look of flowers. Being located near to Kew Gardens, the idea was to bring part of Kew Gardens to the local station and football ground.

Situated in the space, there is a camera which uses computer vision to determine the average direction of flow from pedestrians. Using this data, the animations run across the artwork will change direction to match the direction of the pedestrians in the tunnel. There are several modes within the artwork, but the most notable being: Ambient Mode which allows all the petals to fade in and out at different speeds, Nectar Guides mode which selects a certain colour from the fixtures and will run a single shot sine wave across the lights with that colour in the direction of the pedestrians, and the final mode being Bloom which takes makes all the lights with the same colour in a luminaire “bloom” on and off at the same time.

Below is a screenshot of what the software that I coded looks like. The software is a digital twin of the installation using lights with IES files to recreate the exact light pattern on the wall in the simulation. At the bottom of the screen you can see the RSTP stream which the camera can see. Within unity, background subtraction is done and vector flow calculations are done within Unity via an OpenCV implementation. The bottom right hand side is a status indicator showing what background service dependencies are active and running. On the left of the screen is a simple DMX viewer which allows me to visually monitor the DMX output being sent to all of the drivers.

Photos and videos taken by Jason Bruges Studio.