You’re standing on a busy New York street when all of a sudden you notice a tornado quickly overtaking you. You watch as it nears, picking up signs and debree along the way.  You can feel the wind speed increase as cold gusts blow over your skin. The tornado overtakes you. A street sign cracks an adjacent window. Then its gone and you are left with a photo of you in the midst of the storm.  This was the experience created for the Stormchasers out of home interactive advertisement.

The application was calibrated to it’s environment and understood the architecture of it’s surroundings. This allowed the tornado to be composited on screen in relation to depth. As the tornado neared the screen the application would understand at what depth buildings, cars, or people where located and know whether or not the tornado should be drawn in front or behind them.  This allowed for the create movie grade special effects in real time.

The tornado was composed of four layers of video all of which moved through the environment independently. In addition, three layers of wind/debree video was composited on top of the whole scene.

The computer was also connected to a microcontroller that was controlling the speed of two industrial grade blowers. As the tornado approached the blowers would increase in speed and pulsate left to right in order to create a whirling wind feeling.

For me the best part of this project was seeing how creative and playful people got with the photographs. People would hold on to street signs, hold their baby up with one hand as if being blown away, duck, scream, pretend to run, and much more.  All these images could were automatically uploaded to the Stormchasers Facebook page and through text messaging could be uploaded onto the user’s Facebook profile.  In one series of photos you see a police officer play with the application, disappear for ten minutes, then reappear with five other cops. For the next twenty minutes the cops took repeated photographs with increasingly hilarious poses.

E entertainment did a story on the advertisement when the guys from Stormchasers showed up to the site in their tornado proof vehicle. It was pretty fun having the crew of Stormchasers play with the advertisement, get excited about posing, and uploading their images to their Facebook accounts… not to mention taking sledge hammers to their vehicle.