An installation that lets one wander through a 3D labyrinth made from one's own scanned fingerprint. The fingerprint scanner uses a prism, a macro photographic lens, and a webcam to capture live video of one's print. A Processing application (with some custom Java bits), running in presentation mode, captures live video from the scanner and saves a convolved image to another computer running the Fingerprint Maze game. An OS X application, written in C++ and OpenGL, picks up fingerprint files and renders them in 3D. For each dark pixel it finds in the image, it places a translucent cube in virtual space. The labyrinth can be navigated from above, or explored at ground level. What we made is something between copy machine art and generative architecture. photos: top view of scanned fingerprint. |