Microhabitat
A microhabitat is a virtual home tour that can be seen through a microscope. It welcomes audiences to a tiny room of a person living in NYC.
PROJECT Year
2021
CATEGORY
Social Change
Media Art
EXHIBITION
ITP Spring Show
Responsibilities
Programming
Fabrication
Tools
Arduino Nano
P5.JS – WebRTC
Design Background
The work brings the housing problem the 20s and 30s are facing. Finding a habitat has become more difficult. The more you get close to the central part, such as NYC or Seoul, the more expensive rents get making it tougher to find a place, and the smaller the room becomes. However, no matter how small the room may be, there lives a person with their own unique story and a big dream.
Inspiration
Design Concept
A microhabitat is a virtual open-door to a tiny habitat that can be seen only through a microscope. It welcomes audiences to a tiny room of a person living in NYC. The tour is not as big and fancy as you see in many of YouTube’s’ open doors. Comparing the size of the room to that of other open door videos, it may feel like looking into microscope slides where details are only visible via a microscope.
The audience peeks into the small room of a person through a microscope that has two controllers. Using the knob on the right side, a stage controller, the audience can look around the room as it rotates the camera situated at the center of the microhabitat. Using the knob on the left side, coarse adjustment, the user can look into the details on specific objects located in the room. Each object contains a personal story of the person living there as if you see the product details of objects that YouTube has in one’s open-door video.
The microhabitat contains 6 objects with the person’s own stories.
System Flow
Microhabitat used WebRTC to communicate between two computers in distance.
Virtual Microhabitat
Being physically remote, the web version will allow the audience to get hints on what they will see using the real microscope.
The experience uses PoseNet to track the distance of the eyes to the screen. The detailed information is shown when the user gets close to the screen.
