PoseType – Characters in Motion

PoseType started as a ridiculous brain fart idea in spring 2020 by Michael Kreß and Erik Seitz while we were playing around with the still newish OpenType font variations feature. Brainstorming, thinking and tinkering around with several concepts the idea formed to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with this technology in a playful way.

For the rest of summer 2020 we explored the idea of an interactive installation in which the user interacts with a glyph in an approach slightly more unusual than the slider game you normally know from variable fonts. We found inspiration in a game show and adapted some ideas to our needs. Now the whole transformation of the glyphs lies in your hand… literally.

The installation “PoseType lets” the user explore the design space of different glyphs that we designed especially for this project. With a pose estimation framework we keep track of certain key points of the users body to then calculate a value for our design space to display a specific transfor­mation of the glyph.This is one of the first screencaptures of a successfull trial run.

“PoseType”, a project in cooperation with Erik Seitz.