Two interactive installations that impacted Milan Design Week

It's not enough to just see, you have to experience it. Among the new features at Milan Design Week , which attracted the world's attention from April 9 to 14, two installations caught everyone's attention for their interactive and immersive proposal. Whether capturing the purity of human movement using light, in Bodies in Motion, or in the atmospheric tunnels that incorporated visitors in Raytrace, they show how the present and future of architecture and design do not give up on what is most human about us, such as perceptions and sensations. We show the details of each one below.

Bodies in Motion

Ergonomic design firm Humanscale tapped New York-based designer Todd Bracher to produce the installation. Bracher, in turn, collaborated with digital design studio The Green Eyl. The result is a light sculpture with interactive beams that follow the movements of the human body. The piece, as its name suggests, mirrors the visitor’s movements in real time. As the body moves, its key points are captured by the sensors of a state-of-the-art camera. The software controls 15 motorized lights that react to the movement and project precise beams onto a screen 15 meters away. Behind the apparent simplicity of the creation, there is a complex scientific method. It reinterprets a study by Swedish psychophysicist Gunnar Johansson in 1973. Johansson positioned lights at different points on the actors' bodies, then recorded their movements in the dark and analyzed them without distraction. In other words, the light would allow a purer view of the body's dynamics.

Presented at Fuorisalone, the production transformed the dark tunnels of the historic warehouses beneath Milan's central train station, creating a triangular passage measuring 25 metres long and 6 metres high. All surfaces were covered in Dekton®, including the Slim line, which is just 4 millimeters thick and is a new product from Cosentino. The material gained a new appeal and new possibilities, with the proposed harmony between architecture, light and water that helped to reflect the whole. The waves projected onto the surfaces also produced a calming effect. In total, 29 glass spheres and 87 LED lights were used. A mirror at each end reflected the installation, giving the impression of an infinite space. “The most important thing about Raytrace is how it makes people feel. We encourage people to touch it, interact with it and really experience the properties of Dekton®,” said Benjamin Hubert. Check out the full coverage of Milan Design Week 2019 .