Grantham Optical Flow

Optical Flow is a project which is installed in the town of Grantham, UK. The Grantham council approached JBS to create a project which would bring the people of Grantham closer to the town which they live in, but in particular, the river of Grantham. The designers at JBS came up with a sculpture which would digitally represent the Grantham river by using live data gained at the site of the installation. Interactivity is at the heart of JBS’ work, so the sculpture needed to allows viewers to affect the sculpture in a unique way.

I was assigned to bring the ideas of the designer’s to life. I built this project in Unity which allowed us to simulate the water. Unity is a power in-real time game engine, which allows for both the interactivity element which was needed, but also houses a powerful graphical system which allowed us to simulate the water which we would show on the sculpture. A procedurally generated ocean was created within Unity which was mapped onto the sculpture. The ocean simulation allows for realtime foam, ripples, and altering of waves characteristics. Serial data is read from the wind anemometer mounted at the top of the sculpture, which in turn affects the waves. Live wind speed and direction is used to adjust the amplitude and direction of the waves which are displayed on the sculpture which results in changing how the water glimmers on the sculpture. The higher the wind speed, the greater the amplitude of the waves which creates more ripples to reflect off. Serial data is then sent out to the LED boards to display this content. Each LED cluster on the boards has an IR sensor which is used for interactivity with the sculpture. The data from the IR sensors are sent back to Unity and a custom collider mesh is generated wherever a sensor has been triggered, which in turn displaces the waves. This allows people to interact with the content and move the waves across the sculpture.

To help with testing since I didn’t have access to the final sculpture, and ensuring that I had correctly mapped the content, I remade the sculpture within unity. The boards function as in real life with the same data that would be sent to the sculpture via serial, instead being sent to another machine via UDP which runs the simulator. This helped to ensure that the boards were displaying the correct data in the orientation that they were to be mounted on the sculpture. The simulation also allowed for the ‘sensors’ on the virtual boards to also send back the same data as if they were real boards, allowing for the unity project running the content to react and change to the virtual content.

Video By Jason Bruges Studio

The below images are provided by Jason Bruges Studio. The sculpture is situated in a workshop where the team are shown testing and tweaking it.