The three ideas that I am currently thinking about fall into two groups, the first an idea similar to a Pin Art board and the second is reminiscent of the ceiling in the Hogwarts Great Hall.
A classic Pin Art board is a series of pins arranged in a rectangle that you push your hands, face, or any other part of your body against to make a shape in the indentation. My idea is to use LEDs rather than pins. As something moves closer to an area the corresponding LED becomes brighter and as it moves away the LED becomes dimmer allowing you to control the patterns in the LEDs similar to how you would effect a Pin Art board.
The next two ideas I have are somewhat similar to each other, but have their own twist. The first, a ceiling like that found in the Hogwarts Castle Great Hall would involve having a screen positioned on the ceiling that would show a view of what they sky “should” look like. For example, on a clear night it would show the stars and Milky Way in their corresponding place in the night sky. On a cloudy night clouds the corresponding number of clouds would be overlayed. Based on the weather and time of year different overlays would be added to the image shown.
My last idea is similar to the ceiling, except as an opaque window. The “window” would appear like a view to the outside world through an opaque window. During the night it would be dim, the day bright, during sunrise and sunset there would be the corresponding colors. When its rainy or snowy you would be able to see rain drops or snow flakes landing on the window. When windy you’d see leaves blow past. Potentially, I might even include the odd person walking by.
Artist Question: How can I make the window more engaging or interesting to look at?
All of your ideas are really cool!! I’m not sure if you had this in mind already, but maybe for your window idea, you can start off with a painting/drawing of a scene and then have the light be added to it when its on. That way if the lights are not going, it would still be a great piece of work! Maybe also somehow connect it to your phone so you can choose what will be displayed that day? But I think the idea overall is very interesting and engaging!
I think that the window would be very interesting to look at if you had different storms happening outside, many people are mesmerized by watching it snow or rain, you could even make it look like there are wind storms by having shadows of leaves fly by.
With the window idea, depending on how technical you want to get there’s a lot of different ways to sense the environment in order to replicate it on the window. A few ideas that came to mind are: imitating an altered version of a live camera feed, temperature sensor to guesstimate the weather/season and display a corresponding environment on the screen, or an ultrasonic sensor to detect when someone walks by to maybe display a shadow of someone walking by.
With the window, it would be interesting if the light was strong enough to create a mood for the room / cast ambient light for the whole room, similar to James Turrell with his Ganzfeld effect. Otherwise, I agree that having the window interact with its environments through sensors would be really fun.
I think a great way to make the window idea even better would be to make it in an actual window then you could have natural backlighting and it would give you space to make the piece more 3D.