LED-s Urban Carpet

The LED-s Urban Carpet is a portable interactive installation using a non-traditional user interface. The installation represents a game with a grid of lights that can be embedded as a carpet into the urban context. A pattern of lights is generated dynamically that change in real time according to pedestrians movement over the carpet. In this case the pedestrians become participants that influence the generative process and make the pattern of LEDs change with the change of the location of one or more participants.

The aim is to create a novel urban experience that invites social interactions with the interface among different people as friends, observes or strangers. Here we investigate social interaction patterns and behavior generated through the introduction of this new kind of interface. We describe the concept, design and implementation of this interactive installation.

The LEDs Urban Carpet is conceived as a grid of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which interact with the pedestrians by tracking their paths as they move over the grid। The lights turn on or off via a computer generated program, which defines the behavior of each light at every instant. This program is written using a Boid algorithm to simulate a flock of seagulls that follow the pedestrians as they move in different directions over the carpet.

here is the video >>