You casually stroll past a large screen in a passing window and can't help but look at it, and notice something peculiar: it seems to be mimicking your movements and displaying some data about them too. Should you be creeped out? Is it some kind of new PRISM initiative? Thankfully no, it's an installation by interaction designers Undef called User 632.Set up in Basel, Switzerland, the piece used three Kinect cameras to track the people who walked past it, noting whether they stopped or just walked on by. It then translated their movements into a wiggly line, parroting their actions and revealing how long they were in range of the installation.
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Get too close though and your photo is taken and shown next to your data. "When a visitor enters a specific area, the algorithm is looking for a face. As soon as one is found a countdown appears that shows the time until a photo is taken automatically. At the same time the time a user is in the visible area is stored. This data (time, path and eventually image) are stored in a database, interpreted and displayed as realtime statistics."
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