Output details

Experiments (Taste)

<29> These are projects about visualising people’s sensory experience. The first was an exhibition at the Menier Chocolate Factory Art Gallery. The exhibition revolved around software that took data about taste and turned it into generative visual artworks: these artworks were shown on screens at the exhibition. Visitors each tasted one of twelve ice cream flavours and reported their experience in using the official British taste classification: Juiciness, Intensity, Richness, Sweetness, Creaminess, and Afterglow. This data was directly linked to a generative engine that we constructed for this project. The system made visualisations that changed as new data arrived. As well as the gallery installation the work was a marketing campaign for Freggo ice cream on several large video billboards around London.

This led to a second marketing project for Glenlivet: this featured on their website and Facebook page. The idea was to reveal characteristics of a new premium whisky through online interactive play. There are four challenges: taste, feel, sight, smell. Each one of them is an interactive generative web-based artwork. The user’s taste data are visualised using sophisticated graphical technologies: the sight graphic uses the marching cube simulation algorithm for creating curved objects, the feel graphic is a fluid simulation using navier-stokes; the smell graphic uses a particle simulator with up to a million particles that interact according to known physical principles. All of these computations are done in real time on the website, possibly first commercially-based project to use webgl to provide this on-line functionality. Builds on Zimmer’s work (with MIT Touch Lab) on modality in sensation. Zimmer was involved in the conception of this work and the design of the software systems.These projects are part of Greyworld’s exploration of interaction and public spaces.