Time moves faster in the mountains

Processing GLSL Laser-Tracking TUIO

Music by Frieda Emmrich
Visuals & Interactiondesign by Camilla Scholz

Inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, this interactive artwork brings to life the phenomenon of time dilation, the way gravity alters the speed of time. Though imperceptible to human senses, this effect is already measurable with precise clocks on Earth: time moves slower near massive objects, as it does at sea level, and faster at higher altitudes, such as in the mountains.
In this installation, you walk across a floor designed as a topographical map, where peaks and valleys influence the speed of your personal time. As you move, your personal speed of time becomes audible, the music dedicated to you speeds up or slows down. On the walls, each person is given their own piece of sky, shifting from day to night at a pace dictated by their personal time.
By listening, you can sense when you are in sync with someone else, your times aligning in harmony. By looking at the wall, you can compare skies and see when the same amount of time has passed for different individuals.
By transforming an abstract physical phenomenon into an immersive experience, Time Moves Faster in the Mountains challenges our assumption that time is absolute, revealing its fluid and personal nature.

Camera: Lun Raaberg, Pauline Hübner
Participants: Mirjam Bär, Neo Klinger und Jingwen Luo

“time moves faster in the mountains” was built using Processing 4. The visuals are created with GLSL, and Frieda Emmrich developed the audio in Logic X Pro.
It was created specifically for the Ars Electronica Deep Space, an immersive, interactive projection room. The projection consists of two 4K projections for each the wall and the floor each 16 by 9 meters. The interaction stems from a laser-tracking system on the floor that tracks people's positions in the environment. Multiple laser trackers are set up at the corners of the room to detect people walking on the floor. The laser tracking system then sends OSC messages through the TUIO protocol to the running program.

The code creates a canvas 3840 by 4320 pixels, the size of the floor and wall together, and thus spans the whole projection surface. As a starting point, a sketch by Holunder Heiß, Senior Artist at the University of Arts Linz and Teacher of the AEC Deep Space course, was used, which already implemented the sizing and laser tracking. The laser tracking works by using the TUIO library for Processing to get the players' positions and indices. For each person who enters, a new player object is created with its own position and index. As the players move, their position is updated. For “time moves faster in the mountains”, a new player is only added when there are fewer than five people already in the environment. Each player keeps track of the current speed of their time and total time passed, depending on their position.

The visuals are created with the shader programming language GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language). GLSL is a Cstyle programming language that runs directly on the GPU. Through shader programming, more complicated visuals can be created without compromising performance. The shader gets information about the player's position and the total time passed through uniforms, variables that allow communication between the processing sketch and the shader code. This information will then be used within the shader to adjust the visuals accordingly. The floor is built from multiple layers of the gradient noise function by Íñigo Quilez to create a natural-looking terrain . This noise layer is then coloured in and divided into different height levels. The sky is programmed through a mix of gradients, noise, and random functions to create the background, clouds, and stars. The information on the current speed of time for each player is sent from the shader to the processing sketch by colouring in the top 5 pixels in a greyscale that corresponds to the speed, which can be read in the Processing sketch.

For the sound, I used the Processing sound library, and Frieda Emmrich composed it in Logic X Pro. It consists of one background track that loops continuously and individual tracks for each player. For each of the five people who can enter, there are 5 different tracks. Each track has the same length that equals the length of one bar, but is filled with notes of different lengths. The notes are sixteenth, eighth, quarter, half, or whole notes and are played according to where the person is standing and thus their current speed of time. Each person has their own sound quality, and the tracks of all people together create a harmonic melody.