John Train- Mehmet Sinan Ascioglu

"John Train" is an interactive cinematic performance produced to be displayed on 120 x 12 foot square screen at IAC Building Gallery. In the performance, a burglar breaking into a house notices the train toy which makes him remember his last job as an assassin. His playing with the train set interacts with the screen, in which the imagination of the burglar is reflected, and the story of his last day is recreated on the screen. The burglar tells his story in sync with the unfolding story on the screen.

"John Train" uses 120 foot wide screen (8160x768 pixels) to display inside of 7 windows of the train car in detail.

The Exhibitions

ITP Winter Show 2007 @ ITP, New York, December 16th-17th, 2007.

Big Screens @ IAC Gallery, New York, December 7th, 2007.

How It Works?

The toy train set is synchronised with the screen wall via Arduino. IR Sensors are used to detect the position of the train, and two buttons are used to stop and run the train. When train starts running, the signal is also sent to the 3 Mac G5 computers, which are connected to the 6 projections behind the wall. The application is built with Most Pixels Ever Library overlays the train texture on top of the videos, and positions them in sync with the physical train.

download the source code here.

progress

This is a summary of the whole progress documented at my blog, itpedition.

Personal Statement
The physical scale, particularly the panorama quality of the "big screens" in IAC building allowed us to build a story around the medium itself. The train setting lends itself well to the ability to have windows containing different scenes happening simultaneously as the story unfolds.

Background
As we developed our project, we agreed from the beginning that the primary goal was create a new cinematic experience with the main purpose focused on storytelling. We also decided early on that we wanted to use audio and video instead of generative/algorithmic art. Robert and I (Sinan) had different interactive storytelling experiences on video, so we decided to explore the ways to combine our experiences.

Constraints
We faced a lot of problems in this project, and we were even in luck not to have the project crash in the middle of the show.

Columns: There were 3 columns in front of the video wall, which were giving people hard time to see different windows on the screen. Also, they were creating a distinction between the real space and the world in the screens. So, we decided to use them as a part of the performance, where the burglar begins the scene by hiding behind them as they were walls in a house. Also, we positioned the windows on the screen accordingly, and filled in random passenger videos to the windows that were hard to see (behind the columns).
Quicktime Video Bug: Quicktime for Java has a known issue, which is crashing once in a while. The crash is random, and no solutions yet to be found by the Processing community. We tried to tweak this random crashing by testing various video codecs, keeping the video size minimum, and differentiating the computers so that a Mac G5 would only load the videos that is displayed within its screen width. Also, we used a different video library, which is known to be more stable. This way, we were able to minimize the random occurence of this crash, and the application was able to make it through all the trials and the show nights (Currently, it crashes after ~15 mins of play, which is less than the duration of John Train.).