CATtalk: An IoT-Based Interactive Art Development Platform

Interactive art has been significant advanced by the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber physical interaction technologies, which enables the participants to engage with the art devices. Several tools and platforms have been proposed to create the art devices. However, the interactive artworks are typically developed with these art devices in ad hoc approaches, and the artists need to spend significant programming efforts to integrate the art devices. This paper proposes CATtalk, a platform to create and maintain interactive artworks. The novel idea is to treat all art devices in an interactive artwork as IoT devices that can be transparently reused by reconfiguration in CATtalk. Therefore, the artworks developed independently by individual artists can be quickly integrated to create new interactive applications. Through CATtalk’s no-code and low-code mechanisms, the artists can manipulate CATtalk with little or no programing efforts. CATtalk offers a built-in mechanism so that any person in the audience can play with an interactive artwork with his/her smartphone. We also conduct analytic analysis, simulation and measurements to ensure that the interactive art performance in cross-country remote stages are not affected by the communications delays. In our measurements, the average local and remote communication delays are about 0.01 and 0.05 seconds, respectively. If the art performance is designed such that the average delay between two actions of a local (remote) performer is longer than 0.1 seconds, then the probability of out-of-sequence actions is less than 0.01%. That is, the local dancer should perform slower than the remote dancer. Such delay analysis for remote interactive art performance has not been conducted in the literature.