I was part of a team of students and staff from across the Media Lab that designed an installation for display at SXSW 2012. The theme of our installation was “Making Connections”, designed to give SXSW attendees some playful and creative ways to contribute data about themselves and see how they connected with others who had visited. One form this experience took was a visualization of a globe on which a user could see their connections to the home countries of their Facebook friends. With the help of a Kinect, a user could use free gesture to manipulate and interact with the globe.
For this installation, I was responsible for the sound design, which provided ambient sound in the space as well as giving feedback to the user when he or she interacted with the globe, both through changing tonality with the user's quality of movement (for example how slowly or quickly they were turning the globe) and through triggering sounds associated with certain countries or regions on which a user might stop the globe.