Flying Cities: building a 3D world from vocal input

The Flying Cities artistic installation brings to life imaginary cities made from the speech input of visitors. In this article we describe the original interactive process generating real time 3D graphics from spectators' vocal inputs. This example of cross-modal interaction has the nice property of providing a tangible correspondence between the two spaces. This interaction mean has proved to suit the artistic expression well but it also aims at providing anyone with a pleasant and stimulating feedback from speech activity, a new medium for creativity and a way to visually perceive a vocal performance. As the feedback we have received when presenting Flying Cities was very positive, our objective now is to cross the bridge between art and the potential applications to the rehabilitation of people with reduced mobility or for the treatment of language impairments.