Interactive Projection for "MS Dockville" Festival, Hamburg

Over 130 music acts took to various stages at the finale of the music and art festival held on Wilhelmsburg island on the River Elbe in Hamburg. The evening programme included an interactive projection – 25 metres wide and over 44 metres high – onto the Rethespeicher grain terminal close to the "Vorschot" stage. For each of the three days of the festival, we created a module that we were able to start from our own activity space.

"Face tracking" was used to map the participant's face in real-time with a Kinect camera installed above the activity space and transfer it onto various wireframe faces. Ten projectors, each with an output of 20,000 ANSI lumens, were installed on a tower and transferred the faces onto the terminal over a distance of 190 metres. When different visitors came, a new, predefined look appeared for the projection. The real camera image could also be shown to enhance the live feeling.

The whole body of the visitor was then tracked for the "dancecam" and also transferred in real-time to various particle effects – here too, there were different, predefined looks that implemented the dancers' movements as effects, turning the festival visitors themselves into stars on a very special stage!

In another module based on the classic video game "Pong" from the 1970s, two players entered the activity space and positioned themselves in front of a webcam with their microphone. The vertical line (the "racquet") was controlled by shouting loudly into the mic – which is why we dubbed the projection "Brüll-Tennis" (shout tennis). At the same time we showed the live pictures from the webcam above the game, which further increased the fun factor for the audience.

We chose the activity space at the festival site in such a way that members of the audience could always take photos and selfies of the person in the space and of the projection in the background. If there were no visitors on the activity stage, the system automatically switched to idle mode with a predefined and animated video loop as an animation sequence. This ensured that there was always a projection running on the Rethespeicher, thus creating an exciting, additional contribution to the festival.