Interactive Fur Mirror Follows Your Every Move

Fur Mirror

We think artist [Daniel Rozin] spent a bit too much time wondering if he could make an interactive fur mirror, without wondering if he should. The result is… strange — to say the least.

It’s called the PomPom Mirror, and its one of many interactive installations in the Descent With Modification at Bitforms — there’s even a super cute flock of penguins which spin around to create the same effect.

The mirror is 4 by 4 feet and 18″ deep. It has 928 faux fur pom poms which are controlled by 464 motors, each effectively with an “on” and “off” state. A Microsoft Kinect tracks movement and creates a black and white binary image of what it sees. The artist also programmed in a few animation sequences which make the mirror come alive — like some weird furry alien / plant thing…

It’s really weird. But we kinda like it. For a more traditional mirror, check out this long-lost project — an interactive touch sensitive bathroom mirror!

[via This Is Colossal]

24 thoughts on “Interactive Fur Mirror Follows Your Every Move

    1. It appears to be a push-pull configuration so the one color of pom-poms hides the ones as they swap which is extended further. I think the next step should be to add touch sensing so you can do things like poke at it and pet it and watch the reactions.

    1. Not only did such a thing never happen (people all wanting something that exists from a scifi movie), but this thing will set you back $10K and you better have a government sponsoring your art projects to get it set up..

      1. “Not only did such a thing never happen (people all wanting something that exists from a scifi movie), ”

        Well, they do, but its normally a good decade or two between it being in a movie and it being IRL.
        From flipphones to tablets, a lot of things people wanted from Sci-fi went on to become real successful products.

        1. The public wanting a tablet and the appearance in sci-fi decades earlier are wholly unconnected IMHO.

          Now the flip-phone is another matter, the famous star-trek communicator flip might have influenced the want, even many years later.. I say might because maybe it was merely the manufacturer’s designer that took the inspiration and then the universal appeal took the public, because I’m not sure what percentage of the users was aware of the star-trek reference. And talking of which, I hear the feature flip-phone is still half the phone market in japan, which makes me wonder how well known old star-trek is in japan.

          All this makes me wonder if apple or samsung or some such will ever release a badge that you touch to activate. Because the BT headset variant where you touch the ear area isn’t quite the same.

          Anyway your original suggestion sort of turned it around where you have an introduced product become popular after featuring it in a sci-fi movie, I wonder if that would work – or ever did. It might though now that I thought some more about it, because some technology did get more popular through being featured in media I imagine. Although it’s a hit and miss type of thing I think.

  1. Add more poms and turn it into a flip display. Then when your flight is delayed, you have something soft to bang your head against.

    Another way to write in the clouds…..

    1. You could potentially make it full colour with enough pom-poms and users standing far enough back. Having a pom-pom half showing reliably might be difficult though, I suspect it would turn out more like furry Pointillism.

Leave a Reply to ThopterCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.