I Love Dogs _21Jan smalltalk review

review by: Irina Muis
Don’t be afraid, it won’t bite you. How would you like to have a pet dog that does whatever a normal dog does, yet doesn’t eat, poop or die? Then I’d like you to meet Bobby, the interactive new media installation by Edwin Yiing.

“I love dogs” is Edwin’s final project as a multimedia design student at The One Academy. Driven by the desire to explore extraordinary usage of the webcam and speaker, Edwin was able to produce a 2D onscreen virtual dog that could interact with the ‘owner’ in real time.

With the installation projected on the wall, Edwin demonstrated how he could walk, run, jump and even play ball with Bobby. You could even show your love to Bobby by patting him on the head! Later everyone was given a chance to experience playing with Bobby just by putting on a black pair of gloves...

Citing Nintendo Wii and YouTube as his inspiration and research, Edwin set out to use minimal technology as opposed to the expensive equipment usually related to new media. Overall, it was cool and an eye opener, you would never fully understand new media unless you experience it yourself.

Hopefully other designers would be similarly inspired to challenge the norm in producing future works.

// DOWNLOAD
Edwin has kindly made available for those of you interested to experiment in this area, a flash actionscript file that made the motion detection feature possible in his project. Download it here. 515kB zipped.