May 12, 2005
Reactrix ads
Update on uses of the Reactrix technology for advertising:
Each installation includes an infrared camera, a computer, and a projector. As a person interacts with the projected image, the camera tracks his or her movements and feeds that information to the computer; the computer adjusts the image to make it appear to react to the person. Bell says the way in which the software processes information from the infrared camera enables the Reactrix system to operate in the dynamic environments of the real world, whereas earlier interactive projection systems could track users only against white backgrounds or in situations where the lighting conditions were tightly controlled.
Indeed, Reactrix is not the only company developing interactive displays. IBM's Everywhere Displays project makes use of mirrors and cameras to produce similar effects, while a system from Austin, TX-based artistic collective Mine-Control tracks people's shadows instead of the people themselves. But Reactrix's most direct competition may come from Toronto-based Gesturetek, which has created interactive floor displays for clients such as Coca-Cola and Krispy Kreme.
But where Gesturetek is focusing on selling or licensing its technology for a variety of applications, including gaming, virtual-reality-based rehabilitation, and museum kiosks, Reactrix aims instead to build and operate a global network of advertising installations. Linking each installation to the Internet would allow the company to upload new ads and track their usage statistics. Former Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle is a major investor in Reactrix and serves on its board of directors; he says the company would make the bulk of its money not by selling its technology, but from advertising revenue, which it would share with the venues that host its installations.
April 13, 2005
Magic Cubes
This was one of the more interesting projects I saw at SIGCHI this year. It's called Magic Cubes developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore and Osaka University. It's using video tracking - which as I understand it is a fairly well defined technical operation. But, the really cool part is the way its telling small stories that seem to appear from the magic cube. Each side of the magic cube is a different component of the story, represented by the illustration on that side. As you flip sides, you get a different part of the story that is played out as an animation on the computer screen. Here, just watch a short little video I shot.
April 05, 2005
February 12, 2005
Interactivity and immersive enviornments
Workers unfurl fabric, lower left, at "The Gates" project in New York's Central Park, Saturday Feb. 12, 2005. With flowing fabric the color of a sunrise, "The Gates," a massive public art installation in Central Park, was unfurled Saturday for the start of a 16-day stay transforming miles of footpaths in Central Park.
February 07, 2005
February 04, 2005
November 26, 2004
Holo-dek game sphere
The Holo-Dek gaming center in Hampton displays a series of innovations for video game addicts.
One of them is a room with a 13-foot screen, lit by a powerful projector, which is in turn controlled by an Alienware computer, a machine built just for gaming. When projected at this size, video game unfolds at human scale. An opposing soldier appears about six feet tall, and railings and fences come up about waist-high.
"Basically, this is a video gaming theater... like a movie theater for gaming. Everybody gets a state of the art PC and at least a six-foot screen," says Mike Fortier, co-founder of Helo-Deck.
Another of the company's gaming creations is a 20-foot-diameter globe screen with a robot at its center. When finished, the interior will be wholly lit with the game of your choice, 360 immersive degrees of tropical island or race track or deep space, and the robotic seat at the center will simulate acceleration, or the oscillation of driving over gravel, or the continuous spin-out of a car that has lost traction.
November 17, 2004
Human Pacman
A group of Singapore-based researchers are taking Pacman out of the arcade hall of fame and setting him loose on the streets.
The virtual reality gaming system allows players to become the insatiable cookie-munching hero of the classic computer game or one of his ghostly nemeses, simply by donning a backpack and a pair of goggles.
But instead of becoming a yellow blob trapped in a low-resolution two-dimensional maze, "Human Pacman" can roam freely through real environments.
The system was designed by a team led by Dr. Adrian Cheok of the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore, using ubiquitous computing technology.
more here
October 04, 2004
Film and Fragrance
USC Events Calendar - Film and Fragrance
Thu, October 7, 2004 at 4:00 pm
Admission: Free
Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
Intellectual Commons
University Park Campus
Scientist and entrepreneur Avery N. Gilbert reveals the science of odor perception - including the role of biology, psychology and culture - and the many ways in which scent has permeated through popular culture.
Pleasurable scents have played a significant role in society since the dawn of civilization - as an aid in religion and healing, as a spur to international trade in perfume ingredients and as a catalyst to the art of love. Popular culture and entertainment gave rise to Smell-o-Vision and Aroma-Rama. More recently, scents have been used to create a specific mood at special events, from holiday parties to concerts. Scent creation is also at the heart of today's multi-billion dollar fragrance industry.
Gilbert is the founder and president of Synesthetics, Inc., which has provided consulting and multisensory science for the development and marketing of consumer products since 1995. Clients include manufacturers of leading brands in the air care, personal care and fine fragrance markets.
September 29, 2004
"BiReality: Mutually Immersive Mobile Telepresence"
i know we have our own talk tonight, but thought id spread news. figure people here knew of this work in some respect or another. its at harvey mudd college (hmc) out in claremont.
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"BiReality: Mutually Immersive Mobile Telepresence"
Norman Jouppi, HP Fellow
HP Labs
Wednesday, September 29
Galileo Hall, HMC
7:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Lecture followed by a dessert reception
BiReality uses a teleoperated robotic surrogate to visit remote locations as a substitute for physical travel. The goal is to create, both for the user and the people at the remote location, the sensory experience relevant for face-to-face interactions. The second-generation system provides a 360-degree surround immersive audio and visual experience for both the user and remote participants, and streams eight high-quality video streams totaling almost 20Mb/s over wireless networking. The system preserves gaze and eye contact, presents local and remote participants to each other at life size, and preserves the head height of the user at the remote location. This talk focuses on some of the human factors addressed by the project, and includes a short video demonstration.
Norman P. Jouppi is currently a staff fellow at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California. From 1984 through 1996 he was also a consulting assistant/associate professor in the department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University where he taught classes in VLSI, circuits, and computer architecture. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1984, and a M.S.E.E. from Northwestern University in 1980. He currently serves as ACM SIGARCH vice chair.
His research interests include audio, video and physical telepresence as well as computer architecture. In recent years, he has contributed to the architecture and implementation of advanced graphics accelerators, including Neon. Before that he was one of the principal architects and implementors of the MultiTitan and BIPS microprocessors implementors of the MIPS microprocessor, as well as a developer of techniques for CMOS VLSI timing verification. He holds more than 20 U.S. patents and has published over 80 technical papers.
September 19, 2004
febreeze scent stories
i don't know how this slipped by me. but im sitting here watchin vh-1 while coding and theres an ad for febreeze's 'scent stories'. you load in a disc and it releases smells over 30 minute increments. a quick google search yielded a small story on boing-boing, which makes me really wonder how i missed it.
September 18, 2004
Earthdance 2004 LA
http://www.earthdance.org/la/
EARTHDANCE:: LA:
24 HOUR OUTDOOR CAMPOUT
Join us for the Planets largest synchronized global music event and unite with over 120 cities in 51 countires at the 8th annual Earthdance gathering for world peace. Experience 24 hours of forest adventure on a 160 acre private ranch just 25 miles North of Los Angeles.
<><><><><>
WHEN: SUNSET til SUNSET
OPENING CEREMONY :: SAT 18TH :: SUNSET (6PM)
CLOSING CEREMONY :: SUNSET (6PM) :: SUNDAY 19TH
WHERE: GOLD CREEK RANCH (ANGELES NATION FOREST)
<><><><><>
A Southern California musical adventure.
Earthdance is an all ages Festival of Life. All people, cultures, artists, healers, drummers, dancers and performers welcomed!
• Featuring over 60 DJ's, Live Musicians, Dancers, Visual Artists and Performers.
• TWO music area's with awesome Turbo Sound, Intelligent lighting, fx & decor.
• Ambient, World, Breaks + Down beatz area brought to you in the special Lotus Lounge (decor provided by the DO LAB).
See you all on the other side.
July 12, 2004
Mobile Immersive Audio
The IM division definitely needs one of these.
July 01, 2004
Pitfalls of Virtual Property
"The debate over who owns what in persistent-world games got a bit more knotty recently when online gaming consultancy The Themis Group released a white paper written by one of its advisory board members, Richard Bartle. Bartle is an Essex University principal fellow and author of the 1993 book, Designing Virtual Worlds. He has become one of the most visible commentators on the subject of "ownership" of virtual-world property. For anyone who has kept abreast of the conversation, the complications come as no surprise. As Dibbell wrote recently in his blog, "The games we choose for our amusement are becoming so complex, so involving, that the line between gameplay and career, between gameworld and society, begins to blur." According to Bartle, the blurring will get worse before it gets better."
Gamespot news article
Richard Bartle's white paper (pdf)
June 25, 2004
Multi-viewpoint TV
Technology Review: Fragments Boost 3D TV
In January 2001, CBS spiced up its coverage of the Super Bowl with a special effect that allowed the broadcaster to freeze a replay, arbitrarily change the viewpoint and continue the replay. Researchers around the world are looking to take this technology further by enabling viewpoint changes as the action, including live-action, unfolds, and by letting viewers controlled viewpoint.
The formidable technical challenge in presenting real-time, free-viewpoint three-dimensional video is the enormous amount of information contained in the stream of video information.
Researchers from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich have devised a way to process three-dimensional video in real-time that reduces the amount of data to the manageable level of 3 megabits per second.
June 22, 2004
VR Tool Re-Creates Hallucinations
Technology Review: VR Tool Re-Creates Hallucinations
Reality can seem different depending on who you are. Researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia have written software designed to allow psychiatrists to gain an understanding of the reality of patient hallucinations. The hallucination simulation software is a three-dimensional environment something like the game Quake. The researchers interviewed a patient to get descriptions of a set of real-life hallucinations, then depicted them in the software.
The prototype software runs on a university virtual reality system that includes three projectors and a 9-meters-wide by and 2.5-meters-high screen curved to provide a 150-degree field of view.
April 12, 2004
Smell Cannon
From New Scientist
A new device can track an individual, shoot an aroma directly at their nose, and leave the person next to them completely unaffected.
The air cannon was developed by Yasuyuki Yanagi and his colleagues at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan, as a technique for directing evocative smells to people exploring virtual-reality environments. The driver of a car simulator, for example, might sniff petrol as they drive into a filling station or freshly cut grass as they pass a sports field.
March 19, 2004
Iso-phone: a total submersion telephonic experience
Media Lab Europe
Human Connectedness
James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Stefan Agamanolis
The Iso-phone is a telecommunication device providing a service that can be described simply as a meeting of the telephone and the floatation tank. By blocking out peripheral sensory stimulation and distraction, the Iso-phone creates a telephonic communication space of heightened purity and focus.
"We wish to thank the Guinness swimming pool for their assistance in early Iso-phone trials"
February 02, 2004
SONY 4V camera Workshop
By popular request, there will be a sequel to last semester's workshop on SONY's 4th View panoramic camera system this Wednesday, 2/4 in Zemeckis 201 from 10:30 am to about 1:00pm.
Researchers from SONY will make an intro presentation at 10:30 and then we will setup and shoot a short sequence around Zemeckis or in the Cinema courtyard. Please attend if you are interested in this system and can help with this shoot.
November 18, 2003
HyperSonic Sound
Here are some links to more info on Elwood Norris' focused sound beam technology that I mentioned in 511:
http://www.atcsd.com/tl_hss.html
http://www.sciscoop.com/story/2003/5/21/12299/0499
and a published paper in Acoustics Society of America:
http://www.acoustics.org/press/133rd/2pea.html
or google for HSS audio...
October 21, 2003
Panoramic Camera Workshop
Susana Ruiz is going to present a workshop on the Sony FourthVIEW panoramic camera system this Friday (October 24) @ 3PM in the ZML. Both first- and second-year IM students are invited to attend.
If you have any interest in working with this technology, please try to be there.
October 06, 2003
360cam-orama
In addition to the 360 camera system (4th View) we have from SONY and the work at Prairie Logic that Brad has been involved in, here are some additional links to work on omnidirectional camera systems (courtesy of Mike Naimark):
- Summary page on Omnidirectional Vision Systems compiled by the Grasp Lab at the Univ. of Pennsylvania
- Stereo Omnidirectional System (SOS), Softopia, Japan (nice movies here)
September 29, 2003
3d panoramic video
Prairie Logic has development the world's first technology able to capture 3D panoramic video.
I really wanna see the samples in our "CAVE"
(this is a bit of a shameless plug since I used to work for them, but I wanted to throw the URL's out for people to see)
September 28, 2003
"Look Mom, Nothing To WEAR!"
Kong Man Cheung (aka German Cheung) - PhD student in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, (and others), created a Real-Time 3d Body Tracking solution requiring no body attachments, and published a paper to IEEE in June of 2000. Based on the sillouettes of a human body (or anything else) captured from multiple camera angles, the system constructs a 3d Voxel Model of the person and runs the data through other algorithms to achieve real-time tracking. (If anyone else has seen something similar, please forward it on to me or post it. Apologies if this is old news to some.)
September 11, 2003
Second Life's Virtual Burning Man
All the freeform creativity and dreamy partying -- just without the sunburns, or long lines at the portapotty. In an online tribute to the legendary Burning Man arts festival held every Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock desert, Second Life opened up two new simulators (about 32 acres of virtual land), and let the residents go wild.
Running concurrently with the real-world event, residents immediately converged on Burning Life, held in the Mauve and Chartreuse simulators, throwing up fantastic sculptures and structures. Pyramids of giant monkeys! The statue of a torch-bearing goddess! An electronica-themed nightclub for raving into the wee hours! Elf-bearing dirigibles, pagan art shrines, kinetic horse sculptures, solar system mobiles, and of course, the bonfire incineration of the Burning Life effigy itself. Everything seemed possible, and usually was -- right up until September 2nd, that is, when the simulator territories were returned to normal use.
August 30, 2003
August 15, 2003
CITYCLUSTER: Cave VR piece for Ars Electronica
CITYCLUSTER is a virtual-reality networking matrix, a high-tech container with original technological features, navigation, interactivity and graphic and content style. In which multiple environments, ambiences or cities both real and imagined, can be hosted, coexist and be interrelated within themselves through a common, virtual territory, interconnected by high-speed network, enabling remote participants to interact and collaborate in shared environments.
The framework may be expanded, modified, enriched, developed, and produced ad hoc in accordance with the nature and typology of the environment to be incorporated. The system has been designed to produce an integrated computing facility and to implement a creative high-tech container in which multiple environments may coexist and be interconnected within a common, virtual territory. City Cluster can be adapted to a number of diverse cities or virtual environments.
