Ellie - Flower Wall

Project description

Ellie's Flowers is part of "ELLIE." The overarching goal of the ELLIE project is to enhance interactivity and engagement within the school buildings and the daily lives of the visitors, including Fontys students and employees to various technology companies who visit Fontys ICT for work and social activities.

Ellie's Flowers is a projection of a floating island with different plants and flowers that adapt to parameters measured within the building, such as temperature or CO2 levels. For instance; when the CO2 increases, the flowers will bloom.

The project fits within TQ's innovation and technology focus and can contribute to a creative, inspiring and green working environment.

Context

Since the autumn of 2018, FHICT has occupied part of the completely renovated former Philips factory; the TQ building. This building is located at Strijp-T, the largest building in this area, where innovation, creativity and creation are central. Since Ellie is part of TQ, we also want these qualities for her to give. For this, we looked at the surrounding art for inspiration.

With the new building came new inconveniences, and a big one of them is the amount of unrest and noise that the learning environment entails. So in addition to an aesthetic purpose, Ellie's Flowers also has a functional purpose to contribute to this by giving people awareness of their noise disturbance.

Results

Ellie's Flower-Wall consists of two main elements: the measurement of different parameters and the animation that translates the data in real-time.

For the parameters, different sensors are used to measure the status of the building. In order to achieve this, we learned a lot about hardware and the workings of different sensors.

As for the animation, we started with research and concluded that Ellie's design is meant to mirror the student workspace. To achieve this synergy, a low-poly art style was selected. This choice of art style imbues the projection with a gaming aesthetic, aligning it with the overall workplace environment. We created various 3D models in this aesthetic that we are going to use for the final product.

To combine these two main elements, we use TouchDesigner. TouchDesigner connects the real-time data and shows the animation based on the data input

About the project group

We are a group of three students. As we are all part of other projects we spent various amount of time on creating the Flower-Wall.