PHASE (IRCAM)

This is an example of an immersive experience where the participants came out enriched by their time in the show. The experience was so rich that when I brought my friends who were sight-impaired to the exhibit, they couldn’t believe it. The haptic feedback and the spatial sound were very compelling.

PHASE – a project to develop educational and entertaining metaphors for sound/visual/haptic interaction. The work relied heavily on signal processing in MAX/MSP. The culmination of this project was an installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

I was involved first as an intern to aid in the prototyping and later as a contractor to produce a documentary video of the installation.

The project consisted of two phases of equal importance. 1) To better understand the relationship between visual, sound, and haptic feedback. Several metaphors were developed to illustrate the richness of experience when these three senses are stimulated simultaneously. 2) The creation and installation of a musical composition game that would appeal to the general public. The ability to reach out and touch the physical terrain and to create musical feedback was of prime importance in this development. Technically, the development was done using a powerful music synthesis program (MAX/MSP) and a CG visual program (Virtools). The final installation required four dedicated computers to generate the real-time interactive sound, visual, force-feedback, and to spatialise the sound.

PHASE was collaboration between four French organizations:

• IRCAM – Institute for music/acoustic research
• CEAlist – software-intensive technologies
• Haption – force-feel systems
• ONDIM – 3-D graphics

This video excerpt is part of a 1-hour video that I produced for PHASE. The images and graphics in for the interactive game were made by the project designer.

PHASE Project site: PHASE