TASK: Introducing The Interactive Audience Sensor Kit

Abstract

We introduce 'The interactive Audience Sensor Kit' (TASK). This modular system of wirelessly networked sensors facilitates the augmentation of artistic performances, in particular, music events or visual art. It was conceived to enable low-level and low-cost audience interaction by offering a set of tracker-nodes to be arranged across the venue as demanded by the corresponding performance event. In this paper, we present two modules from TASK, which are currently under development, and provide early insights from a field study. (1) TASKswitch reacts to the presence of bodies acting as an on/off switch and thereby can be used to modify particular aspects of a performance. (2) TASKvector, on the other hand, enables more complex input by tracking movement among the audience. For example, as we will show in the paper, we used the modules to create interactive audio-visual experiences for the audience where projections were modulated by TASK.