This is a prototype system for the VROOM at the Melbourne Museum. It was built under the influence of the center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University, and so ties together space, time and the speed of light.

If we show a video on screen, we are displaying the passage of time. If we mount a camera above the screen, we can measure local brightness (light) in the form of a black and white image. As the camera is pointed outwards, the viewers provide the brightness. We then map brightness to time, where if the light is bright, we show the most recent part of the video, and if it is dark, we show earlier video. This is computed on a per-pixel basis.

Earlier videos took a timelapse video of something and mapped that to brightness. For the final product we took the video coming in off the cameras and used that. The end result is crazy robot dancing as you see above.