Dr Peter Woods
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Interactive AV Installation · Hundred Heads

Annwn

An interactive LED cloud installation that reads the people beneath it and answers in light — part of a multi-year run at the Hundred Heads festival.

Overview

Annwn grew out of a long relationship with the Hundred Heads festival — three appearances, spread across several years, each more responsive than the last.

The first outing was a set of DIY synthesisers that visitors built and played by hand, made from maker hardware — Arduino, Fadecandy and the like. Later years moved overhead, into suspended LED clouds built with Fadecandy, a Raspberry Pi and addressable LED strips. The LED build was published as an open-source guide on Instructables; the interactive layer — a Kinect that lets the clouds respond to the crowd below — was added separately and never written up.

At Hundred Heads
  1. First year

    DIY synthesisers

    Built and played by hand from maker hardware — Arduino, Fadecandy and similar devices — the first outing.

  2. Later years

    Interactive LED clouds

    Suspended clouds of addressable LED strips driven by Fadecandy and a Raspberry Pi, made interactive with a Kinect so they respond to the people beneath them. The LED build is documented on Instructables.

Signal path

A Kinect reads depth and movement in the crowd below; a host translates that into light cues, driven through Fadecandy (with a Raspberry Pi) out to the addressable LED strips inside each cloud — the interactive layer that sits on top of the documented build.

01
Kinect
Depth + skeletal tracking
02
Host
Crowd movement → light cues
03
Fadecandy
Open Pixel Control, Raspberry Pi
04
LED clouds
Addressable strips, diffused

Photography from the installations is being gathered — more to come.

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