February 2013, Sunday 10th. Venice Carnival. A sensor scans models’ faces acquiring them in a digital environment. The software application written by the designers generates customized masks for each model. The masks are produced as unique pieces through 3d printing and WINDFORM materials. The models take part in the Carnival.
This project is developed by DO THE MUTATION – generative design lab, in collaboration with EDGELAB S – space and form strategies. The three masks are produced by CRP GROUP with their WINDFORM materials.
do the mutation enquires the aesthetical properties of biological systems, simulating their formation and growth dynamics applied to material design.
The Carnevale offers the opportunity of exploring this sensibility in a research on the relationship between body and dress, imagining the growth of a biological-synthetic hybrid organism on the human face. We believe that the destabilization created by this condition could stimulate reflections on the physical-virtual relationship, and on the role and evolution of the human body in the future.
APPLICATION – FACE SCAN
The face scan is performed throught the use of the Kinect sensor, that allows to acquire in the programming digital environment the topographic and cromatic data of the models. We wrote the scanning application in Processing, connected to the Kinect via the SimpleOpenNI libraries.
APPLICATION – MASK GENERATION
The software application allows to draw traces on the models’ digital faces, from which the set of curves that forms the fiber system is generated. From the fiber system the application generates the mesh geometry that forms the mask body. The application is written in Processing. It uses the Toxiclibs libraries to generate the isosurface.
We would like to conclude this post showing a few visualizations of the masks developed so far as virtual study models. These ones were discarded from our final selection, nevertheless we believe they show the possibilities of formal variation of the system, able to create very different kinds of phenotypes, customizable on the different models and designers using the application.