POOL
-verb = combine, amalgamate, blend, join forces, league, merge, put together, share
(Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus -)

NOTE- this video was taken from a 2008 demo. It shows the pool in its initial testing form last year. The Pool was recently completely re-worked, and now reflects a much smoother and more robust interaction. We will be showing The Pool in Boulder CO, this July and taking it back to Burning Man in September 2009. For more information on this project, please email jen@blueink.com.

Dive In
(** check back soon for a photo album and video archive of The Pool in action)

The Pool is an environment of giant, concentric circles created from interactive, wireless circular pads. By entering the pool, you enter a world where play and collaborative movement can create a cascading effect of swirling light and color .

Each pad in The Pool is its own wireless controller. All of the 120 pads communicate and listen to each other in an organic network formed in the same way people interact. The Pool has no single master computer and does not use a router to route or control connections. Each pad is independent, and simultaneously interacts and listens to its environment based on user feedback. Together, the 120 pads create complex, surprising, and unpredictable color arrays with their user participants.

By adding and subtracting light, individuals and groups of people will be able to interact with The Pool in profound ways. The interaction will vary dramatically depending on the number of individuals involved. This dynamic interaction between individuals and The Pool will create environments ranging from curious and playful with few participants to energetic and competitive with many participants.

Like a giant game of light “ping pong,” the pool will have users running and jumping, adding, bouncing, and colliding their lights.

Photo of The Pool prototype, 10/2008

How Does The Pool Work

“Learning To Swim”

Each Pad, in The Pool senses how a person is moving. Movement, foot location, foot pressure, and tempo are sensed across the pad surface. As a person moves, they send ripples of light out into the other Pads. For example, by leaning left, a ripple of varying strength may start to your left. A stronger more deliberate lean could cause a ripple to jump rings and fill the entire Pool. Ripples vary in light strength, length (the number of pads this message propagates to), and color. Each person’s ripple is unique.

As ripples connect with other ripples users can merge colors to create greater variety. Users can also destroy or remove another ripple by acting against it. In this way you can choose to add or subtract to the pool- increasing or destroying other participant’s light trails.

Examples
1) Basic Interaction- Capturing user direction and movement.

2) Merging - If another user steps on a pad, and places their weight in the same direction as your path, the paths will mix by adding color. Each additional person leaning in this same direction will add additional colors.

3) Collision - If another user steps on a pad with their weight in the opposite direction of your light path, your paths will collide, and colors will be removed.
This addition and subtraction will allow users to mix colors in a kaleidoscopic interplay.

A Brief Technical Synopsis

Each Pad is created from an extremely durable formed polycarbonate shell, created for outdoor use. The Pads are made for aggressive interaction and public use.

Each Pad is water proof and can be placed outdoors in virtually any type of environment and on virtually any type of surface (even within very shallow water).

The Pool can run off of a single 110 household outlet, a solar array, or a simple, small, outdoor generator. Because it is uses light, the Pool is best viewed at night.

History of The Pool
The Pool was started and funded as part of an Honorarium Grant from Burning Man. It went to Burning Man in September of 2008 where it was tested under extreme conditions in the Nevada desert. During this time we discovered that several aspects of The Pool needed to be improved upon. The inexpensive sensors we originally decided upon due to our budget simply did not hold up to the environmental conditions in Nevada. After several days of aggressive dust storm weather the seals for our sensors failed and sadly stopped working. While this was devastating, the rest of our electronics performed amazingly. Our Pads demonstrated amazing weather durability and strength. As an example, we did have an incident where someone actually drove over the Pool at night. While this in not a scenario we would ever want to see repeated, the piece survived unscathed.

After returning to our Boulder studio and undergoing a thorough cleaning, we began to immediately create designs to improve, fix, and adapt The Pool. We have since devised a much better sensor solution that, after testing, has shown to be extremely resilient, and actually, much more robust.

We also discovered that to make the Pool more portable (such that it can be placed on different types of, often unlevel, surfaces, we needed to adjust the way our polycarbonate shells attach to the internal structure. We have currently devised a system to make this improvement.

If you are interested in showing The Pool, in helping us to improve The Pool, or in donating to help us improve The Pool, please contact jl@blueink.com.

The Pool is being created with parts from   !