World Windows, created in collaboration with Jimmy Chung, Elizabeth Goodman and Keren Merimahm, is an interactive store window installation connecting people in multiple locations through streaming video and touch sensing.

We like to look into store windows, but we usually ignore the glass in favor of what lies behind it. What would happen if you could reach through the glass... right into another world? Pedestrians who walk past World Windows look straight "through" the glass into another city street somewhere else in the world. A handprint icon on the window invites the viewer to touch the glass. Those who touch the glass can affect the world they see beyond it.

As installed at ITP's Winter Show, 2002, World Windows required two identical, person-sized kiosks in two rooms of the gallery. In its final form, the installation would be installed in four large store windows in four different cities around the world. Every site would have three windows connected to the other cities.

If the viewer touches the handprint, bubbles shoot out from the viewer's palm towards the "other world" on the other side of the window. If the other user touches the handprint, that user sends bubbles through 3D space "towards" the viewer. These bubbles are a signal of human presence, and an invitation to approach the window (and the other user) more closely. If two users touch the screen at once, World Windows rewards them further with animated displays of traditional icons of friendship, renewal, and youth: birds, bees, flowers, and butterflies.

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photos: Josh Nimoy
text: Elizabeth Goodman