By Joseph Zhang | www.josephz.me
Pixel Push is a collaborative painting experience that reimagines art in the digital space through experimentation with audio recognition and webcam image-capture. Instead of solid hex code or RGB values, users use webcam video and the microphone as a painting medium.
Advisor: Kyuha Shim, Computational Design Thinking (Fall '21)
Project Duration: 2.5 weeks
Tools: HTML/CSS/JS, Socket.io, p5.js, Google Teachable Machine, Figma
Collaborators: Sophia Kim, Margot Gersing, Elizabeth Han, Vicky Zhou
<aside> 🙋🏻♂️ My Role I was the project's co-developer alongside Elizabeth Han. We prototyped and tested all envisioned interactions, trained the Teachable Machine Learning model, and made the platform collaborative through web sockets. Since each 'pixel' is a webcam image, we also had to optimize the data transferring process for each image from client to server. I also played a core part in designing the project concept and overall experience.
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Tools shape the way we express ourselves and share our ideas. From Microsoft Paint to more complex tools such as Adobe Photoshop, the affordances of creative applications often decide what we create and our means of doing so.
Pixel Push is a playful exploration focused around the future of digital art tools. Rather than solid color blocks, how can users create expressive art using images from the webcam and audio from the microphone?
Prototyped as a website, Pixel Push is intended to be implemented as an interactive experience for video-calling applications.