One of the Stars Shine Night Walk - Cancer Research UK
The Shine Walks are nation wide events hosted by Cancer Research UK – a walk through the city with illuminations, glow-sticks, LEDs, and anything else that shines to light up the city at night. One of the Stars was conceptualised as a personal reflective art piece, in remembrance of David Blake. Our concept demo allowed people to draw a star for anyone they had lost. The star is then added to the star-field, and is kept illuminated throughout the night. As the hundreds of walkers passed by the city, we projected our dynamic star field on to the walls of the City of York.
CHALLENGES: Timescale was an enormous factor in this project – from conceptualisation to execution within 10 days. Design scope, initial demos, and a projection test were completed within the first 5 days. Stars were drawn and submitted through a React app, supported on mobile, tablet and desktop. Our initial plan was to equip a group of 5-10 volunteers with devices, and have them act as on the ground advertising of the project, and to assist people in drawing and submitting stars if they did not have a device on their person. This became impractical due to the speed of the walk, and so we altered the projection – instead of a slowly generated field made by submitted stars, we instead created a pre-populated field that would be a visual show piece for people as they walked by.
TECHNOLOGIES: THREE.JS, REACT, NODEJS
SOLUTION:
// Personal reflective piece
// Expanded to an interactive memorial for all those taking part in the Shine Walk
// Three.js dynamic starfield display
// Location scouting along walk route and light level capture
// Guerrilla style projection on City of York Walls, without official approval – however this was granted on the night
// Projector and portable generator set up for quickly deployed
// Developed front-end user submission in React
// NodeJS server for processing of user uploads
