It’s all just Monkey Business

After seeing the umpteenth hype reel made about a marketing campaign, it is truly refreshing to see such an artistic case study. In this case Monkey Business is an art piece, yet an extremely nifty interactive one. It uses the Microsoft Kinect camera, OpenFrameworks, Processing and the Arduino board to mimic and play with the users’ movements.

German interactive artists Ralph Kistler and Jan Sieber have created a Jumpin’ Jack like monkey puppet that reacts to a user’s movements in front of the Kinect camera. This poetic video with an excellent sound track and voice over doesn’t quite deserve to be called a ‘Making Of’. In fact the analogies drawn between the arts’ audience and critcs and the user and a system are quite witty. See the project explained in its entirety here.

Making of Monkey Business

Jan was previously involved in the excellent Nintendo Wii hack “Wii Spray” in 2009, an electronic spray can that lets you practice without fear of cops or any toxic fumes. Hampered by legal restrictions around the Nintendo hardware, it it is now about to go into proper mass production as a console-independent “We Spray”.