Description:
WorldWideWaste.AE is an interactive installation about the state of the ocean and its pollution. The piece primarily targets the UAE beaches to raise awareness of them being highly polluted but unseen, as the majority of people visit public beaches that are thoroughly cleaned and believe that as the reality of our beaches; while on the other hand private beaches are impossible to clean and maintain by individuals. Another aspect to this piece is to bring attention to e-waste by utilizing an old TV that would have been otherwise thrown out seeing as most people tend to forget that tech is also part of the problem.
Concept:
From the start of the semester I knew that I wanted to work on something that had a message and purpose rather than just an interactive piece for the sake of interactivity and with that in mind I found myself thinking about what problems do we have locally that I would like to bring awareness to and ocean pollution was the first thing that came to my mind.
I come from a family of fishermen and interacting with the sea has always been part of my culture and childhood, and for me pollution was part of that childhood. Walking down a beach and finding all sorts of junk and bringing it back home or just playing around with it. The image of our beaches always being trashed is the reality I see when I think of any beach in the Emirates, but the opposite is true to non-locals who our country curates’ clean beaches for. Seeing people around me genuinely believing that our beaches are clean, that we’re not suffering from pollution, was something I wanted to tackle through my installation. Seeing everything through a clean lens creates further ignorance on how real pollution and waste is. The drive to create this installation stems from my personal experience and urge to show people the reality we live in.
Another aspect of this project is that it is not necessarily relevant to the UAE only but rather the entire globe, however putting in the effort to bring local garbage from the ocean as sort of evidence to the masked reality we’re living is what makes it personal. The final part of this project is in the technology I’m using to output the visuals, I opted for using an old TV that was about to be disposed of instead of relying on the latest technology i.e newest projector/TV as people tend to forget that e-waste is a real problem and we’re all part of it. When one thinks of ocean pollution the first thing that comes to mind is plastic and straws, we moved onto reusable straws, reusable bags and reusable cups but immediately throw out old tech for new tech turning a blind eye to how it affects the environment. In terms of the interactivity of the project, I wanted people to feel complicit and involved with what is going on, pushing them to want to take things out and clean up. Ideally, if this was an installation outside of class I would have wanted to leave the project up and not tamper with it just to see what people would decide to do, would they choose to make it worse or clean it completely?
Process:
Now that my project has been finally completed and done, I can proudly say that this has been one of the most difficult projects for me mainly because I decided to step so far out of my comfort zone and decide to look at tools that I would usually not have touched; that includes the depth camera (intelRealSense), Shaders, addons, openFrameworks, etc.
I haven’t had any experience working with anything that I used for my project and despite all the issues I ran into I can definitely say that I learned a lot regardless even if shaders and some addons did not end up as part of my final project.
The first thing I did was find an addon that worked in tandem with the RealSense camera, although I struggled to find one that worked mainly because most of them were made for the Mac and I didn’t have the knowledge or experience to figure out how to port them to Windows. I managed to find an addon that worked thanks to Aaron’s help and with that I started working. I used depth subtraction to look at what is close and taking out what was far and then based on the amount and closeness of the objects the opacity of the image is adjusted to fade in and out to create an instant response to the interaction so that the user can tell that what they’re doing is affecting the image displayed.
In terms of the physical parts of the installation, I went to a beach somewhere near Al Maqta’ and collected as much trash as I deemed necessary while also getting some sand to fill the box that I had made. The physical aspect of putting it all together was not too complicated as I had it planned out ahead of time and just needed all the pieces to come together. One thing I overlooked was a way to guide people to understand how to interact with the piece without explicitly giving them instructions, the workaround I found over the break was using a grabber and leaving a note where I hung it that requests the users to return it after they’re done; which insinuates that they can and should try and use it.
User Testing:
I tested my project with multiple people and the consensus was, they had fun! Surprisingly, as to be honest I really thought that the interaction might be too slow or requires so much work that people would rather not interact with it; but it turned out I was wrong. All my users understood what to do without me saying anything about the project, which was also surprising as I was worried that I might have to be more explicit with my instructions; but seeing as the image fades into another image instantaneously reaffirms to the user that they’re doing what they’re supposed to. Another point that I received was that the place where I have the camera mounted is a little intrusive and acted as an obstacle when people tried to move things around, that means that I need to figure out a better position for the camera to be mounted and still be able to see what it’s supposed to.
Video:
Code: