Shadow mirror

Materials : PC / MAC, Web cam
Software : Openframeworks, OpenGL, OpenCV
Year : 2020

The mirror was an object given various meanings regardless of the East and West. This object delivers a way to look back on the past or see one's true self and was used to warn oneself and remind mistakes from the past.
Shadow mirror is a program that uses the symbolic meaning of the mirror and represents small movements that are revealed unconscious actions as a visual reflection.

The user's appearance and movement are represented by the size and rotation of a fixed square pixel. If the viewer repeats an unconscious movement in response to your reflection on the screen, it changes to a shadow of consciousness.

The reflection of the shadow state is not a fixed shape in a specific order, but a fluid, and constantly fluctuates according to the user's movement. The generated shadow is accumulated for a certain period of time, leaving a trace, On the screen that the user has left, the traces of the unconscious of the previous people remain.

1. Start : A black circle is drawn in the center of the white wallpaper. Lines with regular intervals appear in the circle.
At the bottom, a phrase is displayed to guide the user to stand in front of the device.

2. Ready : When the device recognized the user's face, the lines on the screen are transformed into squares to fill the grid. ‘Ready’ appears on the center of the screen, and a window for entering the user's name appears at the bottom.

3. Ego stage : After entering the name, it will switch to the Ego stage screen. At this stage, the user reacts by looking at their appearance on the screen, and the response is measured by dividing it into three categories according to specific criteria.

4. Shadow stage : When one of the three items reaches a certain threshold, the content on the screen is changed from the rectangular grid to the fluid field which responds to the user's movement. At this stage, the movement of the fluid generated by the user is accumulated and recorded.

5. Scratch stage : After a certain period of time, the result of the accumulated motion appears in the center of the screen. Whenever there is a new user, it is regenerated, and an image in which all user movements are accumulated is also generated.

6. Start with scratch : If there are no users, it returns to the first screen. In this stage, a cumulative image of all user movements stored in the system is used. The lines inside the black circle vary in size and angle according to this data.