Gwigglerbooth is an interactive, experiential, and real-time social media form creation tool. Developed as an exploration of both interactive computational graphic design processes and the role of emerging technology in graphic design practice, Gwigglerbooth facilitates the synthesis of text and image in the creation of form while also investigating the roles of and the relationship between a system’s designer and user. The Gwigglerbooth name—derived from a combination of the terms “Google,” “Twitter,” and “photo booth”—points to the project’s visual engagement with various social media.
Check out Gwigglerbooth's Flickr photostream to view compositions previously captured by Gwigglerbooth users.
Gwigglerbooth was developed as part of a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design. Please contact me if you are interested in reviewing the full text of the thesis paper.
Gwigglerbooth
Video documentation
Dashboard
The dashboard presents a text field into which a user enters a word or phrase that serves as the basis for his or her Gwigglerbooth composition. The Gwigglerbooth application, built using Processing, then acquires up to eight Google Images search results (as images) and an equal number of Twitter search results (as text) by using the entered word or phrase as a search query.
Canvas
The canvas is a digital projection of the composition generated by the Gwigglerbooth application and consists of five layers: the background, an image (from Google Images), an image mask, text (from Twitter), and a filter.
Controller
The controller consists of a custom application, built using Processing and running on an Android smartphone, which allows a user to manipulate various attributes of the canvas layers (e.g. size of the image layer). The controller also enables a user to capture and upload his or her composition to Flickr.
Active area
Particular layer attributes, such as those that manipulate the position of a layer, require a user to engage with the active area, a demarcated region on the floor in front of the dashboard in which a user’s coordinate position is determined using an Xbox Kinect sensor.