I stumbled across the Bright Nights display in Union Square Park (map for non-locals to NYC). It was beautiful!

Bright Nights is an interactive visual display on the ground in the middle of Union Square Park. High power projectors are suspended 30 feet in the air pointed down at the ground. Snowflakes, curls, circles and other small icons design by Tord Boontje flow around on the ground.

Like the surface of water, when nothing is distrubing the image on the ground, it looks calm. But, as soon as someone walks onto the display it interacts with the person in one of many ways: the icons attract to the person, the icons repel away from the user, the icons pile up (like leaves) as the person pushes them around, or the icons flow in a stream around the user. I’m sure there are other interactions, but those were the ones I could identify most easily.

There has been some press about Bright Nights.

I took a video of the attraction algorithm in action and posted it on YouTube. Watch as the little icons attract towards a user that walks onto the display: (link for those reading in an RSS feed)

I also took a picture of the description:

Here’s the artist’s rendition of how people would interact with the projections:

When I took CS247A (Interaction Design Studio) at Stanford, we all created interactive gateways for our final projects. One team created a display very similar to this one. Unfortunately I can’t find a permalink to their web presence, but check out the course if you’re at Stanford.