Orbits was presented at “Breaking Distance”e, an online exhibition organized and curated by Studio Krom, a design studio focused on interaction and experience design. The studio worked with rheumatism organization Reumazorg to explore ways in which creative coding might be useful to people with various physical and mental challenges.
Orbits is an interactive experience created to support people with joint disorders in performing routine physical exercises. I interviewed individuals affected by these pathologies and discovered that most struggled to complete their daily stretches and exercises because they found them to be too long, repetitive, and tedious. As a musician, I find it relaxing to hear my movements generating a pleasant sequence of notes, and I thought about how I might apply this pleasant audio feedback principle to design a way that would make routine exercises more engaging. The idea was to trigger specific sounds with certain movements, creating pleasant sound patterns and associated visuals.
Using a Microsoft Kinect sensor, I analysed and captured movements. These generate specific notes, gradually enriched with the right movements with notes from the harmonic series. In parallel, a colorful floating sphere reacts to the audio, pulsating and changing color depending on the sounds, and smaller colorful spheres start to orbit when specific notes are triggered.