Can trees become hallucinations? Will spinning perceptual reactions trigger your senses?… Let's treeellucinate !

Treeellucinations is a RTiVISS experience where visual perceptual reactions are triggered by empowering users to influence the environment through interaction. The rotation of the video increases and accelerates through users' participation captured through activity detected by the webcam, working as a sensor.
A first prototype was presented at Future Places Digital Media Festival 2009, representing diverse sights and day times of the forests of the RTiVISS local implementation in the small village Maçal do Chão, including some unusual moments captured during footage in place. The video loop projected in the ceiling suited the involvement and immersion of the participants, invited to lay down to experience the ever changing trees scenario as generative electronic hallucination surprisingly odd. Simultaneously, a screen in front of the users displayed the real footage for confrontation, offering the possibility of a perceptual balanced pause, too.

Current research work is focused on real-time video input from diverse places displaying a range of day times in the same place. Infrared sensitivity to detect activity will also allow for effective responsiveness in darker environments. Realtime 3D graphics are used to augment the video and increase crowd vertigo.
Congregating this development with a large projection scale contributes to a truly immersive environment. Sound is designed to emphasize the psychedelic
associations indicted by suggestive physiological response to visual perception. Hypnotic and possibly stroboscopic effects may happen, reinforcing its potential. As Masai tribes use drums to get into a state of trance, the visual rhythm and cycles of the music may succeed to create the same feeling.

Further approaches will be designed as VJ sets, presented to a broader public in entertainment arts contexts. This experience will require crowd interaction skills, video and music will be king and queen. Visuals will be displaying interchanging real-time video forests with real-time footage of the audience, timecodes displays including accelerated rates, sketched drawings, and typographic elements regarding places captions and RTiVISS keywords.
Aims include to perform artistic experiments that reach a different and broad target, so that users get to know RTiVISS through music, and to deepen expression and interactions regarding image and audio correlation.