We started by brainstorming and deciding on the topic we want to tackle. There were a lot of ideas but in the end we thought that since we all were in Barcelona at the time, it would be interesting to do something that all of us can relate to.

Another thing we thought of was that we wanted people to use senses to interact with the installation. It would be cool if it would be tactile, had different interesting textures etc.

And finally, we wanted to get out of the digital space at least for a bit. The idea of mixing analog and digital would turn this project to something real.

These were our three pillars: being local, using sense of touch and a transition of digital to analog.

Barcelona is a city full of art. There are so many textures, patterns and ornaments that keep appearing all over the city. That was actually the main inspiration for us.

When we started thinking of the actual examples, we realized that there's a couple that are most popular. Our list included bricks from the area of Vila Olímpica, marble from a lot of interiors or plazas, mosaics from Gaudi's heritage and tiles that cover the streets of Barcelona. So, we got the local aspect of the installation.

Remember mixing analog and digital? We thought it would be sick to have a big surface, maybe a whole wall, covered with the textures and let people do something with them.

If we didn't have to think about a budget, we'd get a big exhibition space with a lot of walls. Every wall would have its own texture and it's own pattern. Chunks of physical textures would be scattered around the walls. Around every chunk we'd have special frames that would detect touch gestures on the surface and basically turn the wall into a touchscreen.

How cool would it be to just walk by the walls, swipe your hand on a piece of mosaic and see how your motion continues on huge walls around you? That would be so, if we had the budget for it.

Yeah, the hardware for this was out of our budget and we didn't have that big of a space, so we had to come up with something different to prove our concept.

Regarding the hardware, the solution was simple - instead of getting a special frame, we just decided to use an ipad and surround it by actual tiles. Using an ipad actually breaks one of our ideas - mixing analog and digital. But that was the easiest and the fastest way to prove our interaction model with the resources we had. So, we had to compromise.

We mounted all of that to a white board so we could carry it around campus and show to other students. Then we also decided to put on some music to match the visuals and went on to bother people with our installation.

For our mvp we decided to choose only one texture and to use just one wall to do the projection mapping on. We went with Passeig de Gracia tiles as our texture because they have a very geometric form, which is easier to work with. At the same time the tiles still look very beautiful with cool floral pattern and also associate with Barcelona.

The code for this installation was done by me in JavaScript using SpaceBrew library to get the gestures from the ipad and connect them to the visuals on the wall.

When the gestures on the ipad are recognized, a vector of the movement is being sent to the server and a particle is being shot out of the center trigerring tiles to scale up depending on the proximity to the particle. All of that was drawn to a JavaScript canvas and displayed on a webpage.

For the projection mapping I used another library called MapTastic to map the webpage exactly to the whiteboard.

In the end, all of the hardware included an Ipad, a laptop and a simple projector.

One of the main concerns for us before launching the installation was that it would be just boring. We thought that it wouldn't be enough to keep people entertained.

And then the day of presentations comes. Imagine how happy we were when people stood there for solid 4-5 minutes just swiping left and right on the ipad. The fact that your movement goes beyond the screen of an ipad was truly fascinating. And all of that  was done by a very simple gesture.

So, we were quite satisfied with the outcome. We proved our concept, came to a conclusion that installations don't have to be crazy expensive and complicated and got a lot of inspiration for future projects.