Gadgetory

the Verge's partnering with this year's inaugural panorama music festival and New York City and we're going to be hosting the lab an incredible interactive art space running all weekend long we spoke to Phil and Charlie from mountain gods to artists who have work in this year's space their piece is called gigantic gestures my name is Phil sir zega I'm a designer animator and artist I'm Charlie Whitney and I'm a programmer I got into this by accident it's a lot on a resume that i had to teach myself to program we were roommates for five years so I mean no way too much bad well it's called giant gestures and a physical piece is a gigantic tablet that you use a gigantic foam finger to touch Worth and the idea came out of the fact that we're doing all these tiny little gestures every day thousands of times ago you don't even know that you're doing it and they're pretty meaningless so we wanted people to you have to do those same gestures but feel them so like doing a giant swipe with a finger and so feeling every one of these swipes and making it sort of like a little performance for all we know like swiping and like tapping and pinching the zoom like that could be completely obsolete in 5-10 years like a rotary phone was that ubiquitous like that movement is completely defunct is swiping to unlock is that going to be defunct at some point is that gonna like fall by the wayside you'll feel it and maybe you won't think about it until 30 years from now when you're like ah marine used to swipe to unlock I wouldn't say it's nostalgic but it's sort of the Living memoir of these gestures I think more importantly as a reinterpretation I think it's like taking something that's so small and blowing it up so you can swing a wiffle ball bat in the park but if you swing you know a bat in the World Series it's the same motion but recontextualized it means a lot more we basically putting like an infrared bezel around a large TV which basically shoots infrared light and gets a exact point of where you are within this rectangle translating that into an application that Charlie's ready to keep track of all the data that you're getting in from these touches and then interpreting them and putting them into basically recognizing it just as another touch man I think that music festivals lend themselves really well to these types of things just because people are already like ready to go outside that comfort zone you go through so much thought like figuring out how people are really going to interact with something so taking something that we're familiar with and just reinterpreting it allows for just like immediate understanding