Development

From the very beginning, the idea of our project group was to create an interactive installation of an artistic nature. Whereas, other groups were choosing to create games, we wanted to create an interactive art piece. We researched many idea's for inspiration.

One important part of development was the whole group working/planning together to narrow down all our ideas into one particular project. We all meet up for regular meetings, so throwing our ideas together meant we all got a greater perspective on what we really wanted from this project. For instance, we had all previously decided that this installation would be very much LED based, and we already knew the project had to be interactive, so working these two ideas together really gave us a starting point when we were brainstorming. Thus, this was to lead us on to our original idea.

The original Idea came from a project called FURIN, which looked at the behavoir of fireflies. Using man made objects, in this case candle holders and placing LEDs inside them, with interactivity the candle holders would light up the candle holders and make a sound.

Studying the FURIN installation really gave us inspiration to build upon. Like the Furin Idea, our idea was based upon the objective of studying the behavior of certain animals in nature. The Furin installation was loosely based on the behavior of fireflies, so our aim to was to create our own study of animal behavior, thus, we began researching another glowing insect, Glow Worms.

When initial research began it became very clear to all of us that we were making good progress, and that this was an area that all of us were happy to continue on. Looking up images and videos online, we were immediately taken by the visual power of the glow worm environment. Pictures from the inside of caves showing the a great number of these fantastic insects is truly a sight to behold. Indeed the environment itself looked like a light installation.

As a group, we were all very much happy with the job of further developing upon this glow worm idea. Finally, we had something concrete to begin working on and with development we felt that we could come out with a very good project idea. We decided to play on this idea and started to come up with ideas on how w could simulate glow worms to ireland through an artistic medium. Our next step was to research more on the glow worm environment to see what we could learn and take from it to further our development.

During the initial taught process the idea was to create a sculpture environment for the glow worms to well, which at first was going to be a rock. The idea was still much much like the one we have now but on a smaller scale obviously. This idea was to build a rock of substantial height and width. The LEDs would be randomly placed on the rock and would become interactive depending on the distance of the user and the motion.

The reason why we chose the rock was because it is one the few locations the the glow worms inhabit, the others being river banks and of course, a cave. Creating the rock would of been done using chicken wire and paper mache. Instead of using the room as the actual environment, as we are doing now, the plan was sit the rock in the middle of a room, and having the LEDs slightly glowing with a low hum.

Though we all like the idea of the rock, building an actual cave environment, not only seemed like a more logical idea but also a more impressive one. All the technical aspects of the project would stay the same, as really the only thing changing was the design process, from a rock to a room.