An audio-visual toy created in TouchDesigner.

The question of what a truly alien interface would look like has increasingly become a place I like to explore. There’s fun in creating something that is obviously saying something, while also making it impossible to truly know what it’s saying.

This “Intrusion Detector” reacts to the average level of light detected by a laptop’s webcam. The light coming in is used to create a range of constant colors, whose RGB levels are used to create the shapes of the waveforms, as well as modulate the (awful) audio. So, depending on the room or environment you’re in, the sound is different. It is, however, always horrible.

At a certain average detected brightness, the text will switch to indicate that an intrusion has been detected. A very noisy, slightly strange light detector.