STRP Biënnale, one of world's ten leading festivals on creative technology, incited the curiosity of 30 000 visitors over a period of 10 days this year. Both well recognised scientists and talented young makers present their work at this event. It offers the audience the chance to experiment various scientific themes and see the result immediately. I was part of the crew team this year.
Figure 1. Let's make sense of the future now
Man and machine are connected more and more by systems that translate the sensory information into digital command lines. The key to a successful connection between man and machine is the interaction method. Physics and engineering play an important role to design new and more efficient ways to translate for the machine what the body understands through biological pathways what the environment input states. The future of technology depends upon discovering new forms of interaction.
Video 1. STRP project documentation from Milan van Belle on Vimeo.
This subject is not easy for the audience to embrace. For this, a simple and very popular app (The Particle Party) was designed to track in real time, with dots, the movement of a person in front of a screen. The time allocated was short, and the trace is saved by the user as a photograph.
Figure 2. Celebrate our senses at the Particle Party
"We will keep adding new sensors and senses to the things we make. Of course, everything will get eyes (vision is almost free), and hearing, but one by one we can add superhuman senses such as GPS location sensing, heat detection, X-ray vision, diverse molecule sensitivity, or smell. These permit our creations to respond to us, to interact with us, and to adapt themselves to our uses. Interactivity, by definition, is two way, so this sensing elevates our interactions with technology."
( Kevin Kelly, 2016 )
