Restive Shadow: Animating Invisible Shadows for Expanding Shadowgraph Experience

The primary contribution of this paper is to construct a system for entertainment with wonder shadows. In this system, shadows that behave different to these in our ordinary life. Though an object that is illuminated by a light looks like a black plate, its shadow is not the same as the shape of the object, that is, it has more details than the object. And the shadow also moves. (e.g. When a rectangular object are illuminated by the light, the shadow that is written characters. And the characters are appeared in order.) The system allows a user to become aware of a different viewpoint by intentionally shifting general awareness, that is, “the shadow is simpler than the object and has the same shape of the object” and “the shadow moves only same as the object movement.” In recent years, several studies have tried to extend shadows for applications in media arts. A lot of these systems create artificial shadows with image processing and sensing. In contrast, our system tried the different way of using a characteristic of infrared lights and IR filters. The proposed system generates moving shadows by changing wavelengths of infrared lights and attached IR filters, then achieves a “defamiliarization” of shadows.

Saki Sakaguchi
Kansai University

Hikari Tono
Kansai University

Takuma Tanaka
Kansai University

Mitsunori Matsushita
Kansai University