The Photo-Silhouette Booth

designed with Kate Monahan, Jeff Sable, and Scott Varland for Introduction to Physical Computing



The photo-silhouette booth was conceived as a redesign of a traditional photo booth. We wanted to address some of the problems we saw with photo booths (predominantly awkward timing and self-consciousness during the experience and in the resulting photos) while maintaining key aspects of their appeal (including a sense of performance and play, a tension between public and private space, and the production of high quality portraits against a clean background).

To that end, we built a booth that captured users’ images in two ways:

• A silhouetted video image of the user was projected onto the front of the booth. Throughout the 30 seconds of use, a series of elements (such as butterflies and balloons) moved across the screen and reacted in different ways to the users’ silhouette.
  
• Three times during the interaction, a digital camera snapped a picture of the user. These photographs were taken shortly after the introduction of a new screen element and without any in-the-moment warning. (Since we lacked the resources to print out all the photos) the captured images were saved to a computer and displayed in a slide show on a nearby monitor.
  

At first glance, the photo booth was a simple video mirror like many a video mirror made for the last 30-odd years—and compressed into a 30 second interaction. The interesting part only became apparent after a user saw the photographs and realized that the video mirror had simply been serving as a distraction and an impetus to movement. The photographs generally showed people in motion,* engaged in what they were doing—and decidedly not standing there being painfully aware of having their picture taken.

Like a standard photo booth, the primary output was a brief series of photographs. The technology was simply a method to encourage some behaviors and avoid others—all directed to improve the final off-screen output.

There’s endless documentation of this project. A web page with more images is here, and our blog recap (including a host of technical details) is here. The photo booth was displayed at the ITP 2006 winter show and on the ITP floor for the spring semester of 2007.




* This project was my first experience with a problem I keep running into when working with screen displays as avenues for on-the-fly choreography—-people look at the screen, rather than at each other or out at an audience. There’s also a certain ‘vocabulary’ of movement people tend to default to—i.e., with many video mirrors, people tend to wave their arms about. Sometimes this is a problem, but sometimes it is the issue itself—how do we tend to move in response to digital messages, and what does that say about the design and its messages, about the people using a system, or about possibilities for interaction that remain unexplored?