Can trees become hallucinations? Will spinning perceptual reactions trigger your senses?… Let's “treeellucinate”!

Treeellucinations is an ARTiVIS experience where perceptual visual reactions are triggered by empowering users to influence the environment through interaction.
The rotation of the video increases and accelerates through users' participation captured through activity detected by the webcam, working as a sensor. The aims are to perform artistic experiments that reach a different and broad target, so that users get to know ARTiVIS through music, and to deepen expression and interactions regarding real-time video of forests and synchronized audio.

The first prototype was presented at Future Places Digital Media Festival (2009), representing diverse sights and day times of the forests of the ARTiVIS local implementation in the small village Maçal do Chão, including some unusual moments captured during footage in place. The video loop projected in the ceiling contributed to the engagement and immersion of the participants, invited to lay down to experience the surprising forest video progressive rotation as “hallucinations”. Simultaneously, a screen in front of the users displayed the real footage, offering the possibility of a perceptual pause.

A second version was presented at the closing event of the first AZ Labs residency, combining real-time video captured locally with the forests videoloop, this time as an overlay on the participants dancing. Further work was done at the second residency, testing the real-time video input and real-time 3D graphics, that were tried and are used to augment the video.

Current research work is focused on real-time video input from diverse places displaying a range of day times in the same place. Infrared cameras to detect activity allow for effective responsiveness in darker environments. Combining this development with a large projection scale contributes to a truly immersive environment. Sound is designed to emphasize the psychedelic associations indicted by suggestive physiological response to visual perception. Hypnotic effects may happen, reinforcing its potential.
Further approaches will be designed as VJ sets, presented to a broader public in entertainment arts contexts. Visuals will be displaying interchanging real-time video forests with real-time footage of the audience, timecode displays including accelerated rates, sketched drawings, and typographic elements regarding places captions and ARTiVIS keywords.