Weird Mirror

No client. But you do have a user, and she is very specific: she is a person who walks up to your piece having never seen it, having read nothing, with nobody standing next to her explaining it. We want your projectto intrigue, entrance, delight, unsettle, horrify, etc this person, without any help text.

This is my mental model here; your mileage may vary.

• Mirror. The input is the viewer. They approach your piece, and something changes. Webcam, microphone, presence, motion. The piece responds to the body in front of it.
• But your input doesn't have to be visual. It could be audio. Or a keystroke? or a mouse movement? Or? or? or?

1. A project repo. This will be a public artifact in github. I want you to be keeping notes and progress-documentation here. I'll give you specifics as we go.
2. A working .toe file. Touchdesigner runs on your machine.
3. A live demo, twice. An in-progress one a final. Your project is running, with people walking up to it.
4. A documentation video, 60–90 seconds. There must be a human in the frame. A screen capture of your output is not documentation of an interactive piece; it's just a video, which is the exact thing we're trying to get away from.
5. A build log, in markdown, committed to your repo. What you tried, what broke, what you asked Claude, what finally worked. Rough notes are fine, we want these honest about your process, and not a retrospective.
   
   Note that touch designer files (.toe) can be pretty big, so we're NOT going to commit them to our project repo.
6. Some in-between things. I'll have some in-between research tasks for you that we'll add ot your repo.

• It has to run for three minutes without crashing and without you touching it.
• A stranger has to be able to use it without instructions.
• Your laptop, a webcam, a mic, a keyboard, a screen, and an internet connection are the baseline, and a good project can be made with that.
• You may bring in other hardware. Other sensors, other input devices, projectors, motors, lights, whatever the idea needs. Do it at your own risk and your own budget. I can't guarantee it'll work, and you don't want to get slowed down by logistics. But feel free to play with options! If the hardware is the whole idea, you may need a fallback.
• You may install it somewhere other than our classroom. LIke a hallway, a stairwell, some corner of Chalmers or Marvin. Two rules: it has to be within walking distance, and it has to be accessible to all of us during class time. Tell me early if you're going this direction.
• We'll have about four weeks.