STUDIO PLAY
FOSTERING A CONNECTION TO THE COLLECTION THROUGH ARTWORK- CENTERED PLAY
2016 / Cleveland Museum of Art
Studio Play is a collection of installations aimed at providing a space for children and families to feel welcome in the museum environment. Designed with the entire family in mind, Studio Play uses cutting-edge technology to give families the chance to use movement and play to connect to the collection. Reveal and Zoom is a large 4k video wall where visitors use their bodies to reveal artworks or zoom into an artwork in great detail. The Create Studio, which allows visitors to create their own artworks, consists of four stations: Pottery Wheel, Collage Maker, Portrait Maker and Paint Play.
The installations use a combination of time-of-flight depth cameras, custom C++ software and real-time graphics to create interactive experiences that allow visitors to play with traditional artistic techniques, in a playful, gesture-based way. Visitors may save creations by sharing them on the museum’s Tumblr site.
Studio Play utilized a series of completely new approaches to interaction in a museum setting. Pottery Wheel allowed visitors to use their hand in 3D space to sculpt, shape and decorate clay at a 1:1 scale as if it was spinning on an real wheel right in front of them.
Paint Play utilized a custom hand tracking approach to allow visitors to dramatically throw or carefully drip paint with their hands onto a virtual canvas to explore the experience of action painting.
