Kinect Portraits

The Conference

The eMerge Americas conference partnered with Branger_Briz to create an experiential installation for their EXPO’s jumbotron highlighting one of the conference's central themes: “connect”, the networking opportunities that draw so many participants to the event. We wanted to make something that would fuse eMerge’s digital gradient aesthetic with the faces of the participants who attended the event.

The Installation

The installation uses a Kinect depth sensor to create real-time 3D stylized portraits. Conference attendees dynamically shaped the aesthetic of their portraits through physical movement while being live streamed to six large screens hung in the Miami Beach Convention Center. A number of agencies have started to deploy depth sensors in interactive pieces over the last handful of years but what sets this installation apart is its integration with the web. To our knowledge this project is the first of its kind to stream depth-data driven portraits directly to a web browser. Each participant's 3D snapshots are instantly uploaded to an interactive online gallery (emerge.brangerbriz.com) to be re-experienced and shared on social media.

Since its creation, the Kinect portraits installation has also appeared at the LiveWorx '16 Internet of Things conference in Boston, MA as well as a Bring Your own Beamer (BYOB) event in Chicago, IL.