"I Am" is a poetic collaboration between Pär Thörn, Scott Meadows, Baris Serim, and myself. It started as an idea Pär had about making a Google poem based on user posts on social media websites starting with the words "I Am." From there we created three different ideas that took these posts and turned them into interactive experiences. First, Scott created a website that aggregated the posts and presented them to the user as an endless stream of "I Am's." Baris took the posts and printed them out with a label printer, ending up with something like an old stock ticker tape machine streaming out meter after meter of posts. I took the posts and projected them onto people in an interactive art installation.

    I first use the kinect to get the depth information, then do some background subtraction so that any new person entering the frame stands out clearly. I wrote my own motion tracking system (based on some code samples graciously provided by Ivar at Medea) to track people from frame to frame, find their center points, and do a lot of smoothing for the text to follow people's silhouette properly. Finally, as each person enters the frame I grab the next post from Google starting with "I Am" and pin it on their torso.