Considering digital media as dynamic structures to bridge human creativity and technology, the team led by Yen-Ting Cho designed a digital medium, MovISee, that enables participants to create their own ways of navigating digital files with their bodies, creatively seeing the personal information from all possible perspectives.
We use a depth camera to create mixed reality for people to explore content from their digital files from all possible perspectives and ultimately transform their understanding of body movement as a means to create customized visual outputs. In short, MovISee is a system to recreate information and for people to create individual visuals and games with their existing personal digital files.
MovISee directly responds to the surrounding environment and uses participants’ personal digital content (for example, films and photo-graphs) as a starting point. The results reveal the sedimentary relative movements through filming: time and space are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and interpretations become multi-faceted; multi-layered, images are created in which the fragility and instability of our reality is questioned. Whilst viewers might enjoy the abstracted aesthetics of the output, only the creator – the user of the MovISee platform – knows the original input data that informs the output.
MovISee gives people individual choice and control to recreate per-sonal digital content, leading to new experiences that undermine linearity and relate to the parallel fields of architecture and sculpture. Through iteratively experimenting and playing with the platform, parti-cipants use what they have learned about manipulating content with their body movement to achieve increasingly more complex visual outputs. MovISee creates a climate of creative possibility, so that people rise to the challenge, respond to the immersive context, and push the limits of their creativity.
Dr. Yen-Ting Cho is a designer, artist and researcher with expertise in interdisciplinary digital design methods, including architecture, interaction design, and animation. He has a PhD in Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London; and a Master’s degree from the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University. He was awarded Film Study Center Harvard Fellowships for three years and his animation practice has received awards internationally. He has worked at INVIVIA (Cambridge, MA), and designed interactions for Microsoft Surface, GSD and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. He was a visiting tutor in IDE at the RCA where his doctoral research was on ‘Cubic Film: Interdisciplinary Development of a Digital Participatory Moving Image Medium’. Yen-Ting Cho leads his London-based digital design studio, and he is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Creative Industries Design and Master Program on Techno Art at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan and a consultant for the university’s Culture and Creativity Incubation and R&D Center.