Designs of the Year

PostSpectacular, Fid.Gen Bar Codes

Nominated for the Brit Insurance Interactive Award 2009

Image showing the mass testing of 2000+ markers prior to be deployed at Lexus Luxury Lounge @ NAIAS Detroit 2008

“Unlike most of the other projects shortlisted in this category, Fid.Gen is a design product for creators rather than consumers. Fid.Gen is a generative design tool for creating & tailoring fiducial markers to be used in computer vision based interactive projects/installations using the widely used open source package reacTIVision (http://reactable.org). The layout process of the markers is interactive & physics driven and realised through a simulation of a complex network of springs which automatically arrange themselves into the most optimum constellation to form unique markers.

MARKERS AS CHARACTERS
The markers themselves mainly function as a simple mechanism to provide identity and orientation information of the physical objects they can be attached to and so be recognized by the reacTIVision software. However, very often the markers are also reminiscent of quirky abstract characters and so are cleverly positioned at and blur the boundary of our subconscious human perception whilst being primarily designed as machine-readable objects.

APPLICATIONS
The tool was designed with flexibility in mind and has numerous parameters to adjust the size & complexity of the markers to suit a multitude of projects. Fid.Gen was created over a 10 month period and the author has used various iterations to realize several high profile, award-winning interactive installations at London College of Fashion (in collaboration with Moving Brands; winner of European Design Award 2008, D&AD 2008 nomination) and the Lexus Luxury Lounge at North American International Auto Show Detroit. The interaction design for each of those installations required the identification of hundreds or thousands of objects & people.

CREATIVE TOOLS AS (FREE) PLATFORMS
Apart from the direct requirements of the author, Fid.Gen was also created to help the further community up-take of the original reacTIVision software as creative platform for interaction design projects. It does so by enabling especially large scale installations requiring a much larger set of objects to be identified and tracked. The Fid.Gen software is released under the GPL Open Source license and the generated markers are subject to a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/), making them free to use for non-commercial projects. We’ve also set up an online shop selling organic T-Shirts with unique Fid.Gen marker designs of which all proceeds go to the reacTIVision parent project.”

Fid Gen website
PostSpectacular website