Our most wildly physical instrument, the Gesture Wall senses movement of your body through its sensor field. The music and graphics respond to player's gestures.
Several people at a time can play a Gesture Wall, as long as they stand
on the electro-magnetic (RF) transmitter. Moving through the intangible
sensor field, players alter music and the graphics projected onto a
screen in front of them. For Lincoln Center we have two Gesture Wall
bags, each capable of being played on three different sides.
![[The Gesture Wall Diagram]](/file/13253/park.org.s3.amazonaws.com.7z/park.org.s3.amazonaws.com/Events/BrainOpera/graphics/gesture-sponsor_half.gif)
A "fish" sensor, devised by Neil Gershenfeld's Physics and Media group at the
MIT Media Lab (you can access an index of downloadable papers on the subject)
uses electric field sensing to measure the position of a body within its
sensor field.
The locational information is fed into an IBM PC, where the areas of the sensor field have been mapped to various instruments and sounds.
We are using an IBM Pentium PC running Microsoft's Windows NT platform.
An AWE 32 sound card donated by Creative Technology, Inc. sends out the audio to an amplifier. The gesture music is broadcast through a pair of K-RoK Studio Monitors by KRK.
The PC also holds a Creative Technology, Inc. external TV Coder which sends out a video signal to the projector.
The graphics are projected by an LCD video projector onto a large bag
made of rear-projection screen material.