In FlowField, participants touch and caress a multi-point touchpad, the MTC Express, in a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), directly controlling a flowing particle field. Collisions in the particle field emit musical sounds providing a new type of musical interface that uses a dynamic flow process for its underlying musical structure. The particle flow field circles around the participant in a cylindrical path. Obstructions formed by whole hand input disturb the flow field like a hand in water. The interaction has very low latency and a fast frame rate, providing a visceral, dynamic experience. In FlowField, participants explore interaction through caress, suggesting reconnection with a sense of play, and experience a world through touch.

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Overview

The FlowField system is an interactive art piece in which a dynamic particle simluation immerses participants in a CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment. Simulated physical particles flow in a closed cylindrical path around the participant who feels he/she is standing inside this virtual cylinder of particles due to the stereoscopic particles projected in the CAVE. Input from the MTC Express is used to introduce obstructions into the particle flow.

This system evokes a metaphor of fingers interrupting a continuous flow of water in order to allow participants use the MTC Express as a multi-point input device. This metaphor was chosen to emphasize the effectiveness of multi-point input over single-point input.

Motivation

The human hand is capable of quite a diverse set of actions, free to move in space and assume a variety of shapes and gestures. Computer interfaces to this day, however, mostly facilitate simple one-or-two dimensional tasks, hardly leveraging the capabilities of the hand. While initially this is due to hardware limitations, computer applications have been developed since the beginning to use only these simple input devices.

Now there is this "chicken and egg" dilemma: applications don't exist for whole-hand input, so there is no real push for whole-hand interfaces; but the lack of applications is a consequence of the non-existence of such interfaces. What do we do first? Create the hardware and hope for applications, or make applications for which there is no interface?

Fortunately, someone went and did the former: the MTC Express is a touchpad that resolves multiple points and pressure. We wanted to use this device to perform some task that really showed off its unique capabilities. At the same time, NewMIC desired a demo for its new CAVE facility, so it was decided we would create an immersive graphical application that uses the MTC Express in some way. FlowField was born.

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