Interactive canvas livens The Starry Night painting by Van Gogh

Although a far fetched thought, stirring the starry sky with your finger tips or hands could be an exhilarating experience. If not the boundless skies, Petros Vrellis, a Greek artist lets you control Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night through an interactive canvas. The artist has coded an interactive light and sound show that enables one to swipe their hand or finger across it and the mass of night stars will begin to move in one direction. The particles will make music as they move. The Greek multimedia artist, Petros Vrellis has used creative coding to enable users to interact with the template. Vrellis uses OpenFrameworks, which is a development toolkit putting it in the OF Web forum, visualizing the flow and also creating a setup that allows people to manipulate this flow. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Interactive canvas

Finally, about 80,000 particles move at 30 frames per second on a screen featuring 1920 x 1080 resolution. The touch interface basically helps deform the image by altering the flow of the particles as well as synthesized sound and then returns to its original state, reveals Creative Applications Network. The sound has been created using a MIDI interface that emits soft ambient tone out of the movement of the fluid. Reportedly, the velocity field isn’t computed automatically, it has been set manually and wasn’t an easy task. The multitouch tracking is made with ofxKinect and ofxOpenCV, while the music is said to be the result of much experimentation and luck.

The canvas could get one glued to it for some time, since it would be tough not to play with the interactive canvas. Many would hope to see this interactive canvas of The Starry Night simply hop on to the screens of their tablets or smartphones. Look at the video below to see the interactive canvas of The Starry Night.