While most of us are familiar with the monotonous train journeys from our daily commute—hateful things where brevity is key—they can also be great places to lazily watch the world go by. We’ve all stared out of a train window and imagined different objects gliding or running alongside the landscape, like giant robots or flying dinosaurs or whatever. Don’t deny it.
This project, Touch the Train Window, from Japanese audiovisual collective Salad (aka Particle at Rest) taps into that childish, playful imagination and allows you to tap on a train window to make objects magically appear in the passing landscape. In the video above, the passengers wave their hands on the window to create hot air balloons, silhouettes of children flying kites, planes, and cars which appear in real-time.
It’s all made possible using a Kinect, GPS tracking, a projector, an iPhone, and good old openFrameworks. And it would certainly liven up a boring train journey, (especially for kids) and points to a future where we’ll be able to play interactive games—or overlay information about the landscape outside—on train windows using augmented reality.
