Klaus Obermaier is an Austrian interactive and video artist currently holding a workshop at Roman's Babes-Bloyai University in Cluj-Napoca. His description of his latest work, Ego is ponderous, talking about "the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification" and "the tension between the real and the symbolic, the Ego and the It, the subject and the object."
I don't know about any of that, but I do know the Ego looks hella fun.
Obermaier hasn't revealed his actual methods for pulling this off, but Ego appears to use a 3-D camera—like the Microsoft Kinect—to translate your body into an animated stick figure on the wall in front of you. As you move, so does your noodle-form doppelganger, slightly accentuating your movements so they feel as cartoonish as a Tex Avery character.
As a child at heart, though, I think my favorite aspect of Ego is the generous cartoon penis and/or wobbly wireframe boobs it arbitrarily assigns participants, regardless of their real gender. Obermaier's statement on Ego might be a smack pretentious, but even he knows that everyone gets a giggle out of a big floppy dong.
[via Prosthetic Knowledge]