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Interesting video coverage of Immersive's 360 camera in Wall WSJ this week:

"Immersive Media Corp. (TSXV: IMC) (“IMC”), the leader in 360º spherical video technology, has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal and WSJ.com as part of reporter Andy Jordan’s “Tech Diary” series. In this profile, Andy spent some time in New York City with an Immersive Media team and at a Red Bull event that Immersive Media was filming. Entitled Tech Diary: The Grapefruit Cam, the profile is available for viewing at WSJ.com".

"As a technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Andy Jordan regularly chronicles the stories that can be found when people and technology come together. In this episode, he asks “What if streaming video could be shot in 360 degrees?” He finds the answer when he takes Tech Diary to a Red Bull big jump to check it out. “The mouse moves where the spinal column can't,” says Andy Jordan, describing a “mondo geodesic streaming video dome camera the size of a grapefruit with 11 lenses.”

Techno pundits and industry experts at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), held in August were hailing 3D films as the next big thing.

At the forum, animation supremo and CEO of DreamWorks Jeffery Katzenberg, said 3D filmmaking was the "greatest innovation to occur in the movie business in 70 years."

Tuesday, September 9, 2008 : 6:00pm
University Park Campus
USC Fisher Museum of Art

Admission is free.
Reception to follow.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Irving Biederman, the Harold W. Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at USC and author of over 200 scientific publications, will explore the neural basis of aesthetics. Long a mystery, recent research in cognitive neuroscience has begun to shed light on the biological events that lead us to seek out novel but richly interpretable experiences. Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence will provide a test case for such an account by leading us to experience novel interpretations under conditions in which the dimensions that normally accompany pleasurable perceptual interpretations are reduced, if not eliminated. Think Mary Poppins, noir.

Link

(Adrienne already sent an announcement to the general IMD list, but I just want to make sure that everyone is aware of it - if you are seriously interested in the future of interactive and/or immersive entertainment you will not want to miss this.)



Shivers Down the Spine: IMAX and Immersive Visual Entertainment

Visions and Voices
Thursday, September 4, 2008 : 7:30pm
IMAX Theater, California Science Center
Exposition Park, 39th Street and Figueroa Street
Located across the street from USC. Parking will be available for $8 at Exposition Park.
Admission is free.
Reception to follow.

Explore the power of immersive visual experiences with a screening of the 3-D IMAX movie Mummies 3-D: Secrets of the Pharaohs. The screening will be followed by a discussion with film scholar Alison Griffiths, associate professor of communication studies at Baruch College, City University of New York, and author of Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. The discussion will examine the ways that spectacular entertainments shape our bodily and cultural sensibilities. The event will also look at why these attractions maintain such an enduring appeal for a wide variety of audiences, as they bring together science, sensation and virtuality. The event will introduce attendees to the growing academic field of visual studies and to USC’s visual studies program. A reception will follow.

Link

Speaker: Mark Bolas, Assoc. Professor, Interactive Media Division & Director, Mixed Reality Lab, Institute for Creative Technologies.
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: "Growing the Medium"
Abstract: Mark will discuss his work to create a design vocabulary for the multi-faceted medium called VR.

BACKCHANNEL LOG for class (partial): Download file

Everyone should try to make it to SIGGRAPH this year - especially 3rd year students thinking about how to design an interactive media experience for public presentation. 2nd year students would be wise to attend as they think about prior art and their work. 1st year students would benefit. . . well, see, everyone should go.

One day passes and student rates are available to keep costs down, and it is at the LA convention center - a stone's throw (if you have a really good arm) from USC.

Toward this end, the Immersive Lab, using funds from Microsoft Research, is offering 4 $100 stipends. Recipients will be asked to describe a notable exhibit at one of our weekly research meetings. If you are interested, please contact Bryan Jaycox for application details soon.

This Saturday, July 19 during the monthly C.R.A.N.K mob extravaganza we will be stopping by GLOW in Santa Monica. Sounds like a cool summer event. I've never been (so if it's not so cool don't blame me!). So if you like crazy bike rides (and maybe drinking and jump roping and jousting on bicycles) C.R.A.N.K mob will be heading out that way. If not, you can use an old fashion car and head out to Santa Monica.

GLOW 08

Glow will fill the hours between dusk to dawn with compelling, enchanting and effervescent sights and sounds situated in spaces and times that expand possibilities for where, how and when the public experiences contemporary art.



July 19, 2008

7 pm - 7 am

From dusk to dawn, experience the Santa Monica beach, Pier and Palisades Park through the eyes and minds of artists. GLOW will fill the night with compelling, enchanting and effervescent sights and sounds situated in spaces and times that expand the possibilities for where, how and when the public participates in contemporary art.

Featuring over twenty temporary site specific installations and performances, Glow is entirely free to the public. This unique festival is made possible with major funding from the Norton Family Foundation, along with the Durfee Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Starbucks Coffee Company, and other generous sponsors.

Glow is being produced by the City of Santa Monica in partnership with Bayside District, the Pier Restoration Corporation, and the Santa Monica Convention and Visitors Bureau. Part of the premise of Glow is the unique beach front setting and an homage to the grunion, a fish that lives in local waters and comes up to the beach to spawn creating a momentary 'glow'.

Posted on Engadget:

"It looks like Motorola isn't about to let Apple have the goofy, non-existent product spotlight to itself, with a recent patent application of its revealing some plans of its own for a head-mounted display."

Next version of the ZML, we need a bunch of these roaming around...
Video here.

Cuerpo y Luz (body & light) is a work in progress co-directed and designed by Veronica Paredes (iMAP) & Andrea "budafly" Rodriguez (IMD). This immersive/interactive dance installation was created in conjunction with the CTAN 495b Experimental Animation class taught by Michael Patterson & Perry Hoberman's CTIN 544 Experiments & Interactivity class.

Please join us TONIGHT for the CTAN 495b screening on in the RCZ Stage E and walk through demo from in the ZML 7pm-9pm. Hope to see you there!

Time: Wednesday, April 30, 6-9pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Featuring Spring Semester Class Projects from :
- CTIN 485L Advanced Game Development - Brinson
- CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity (Hoberman)
- CTIN 463 Anatomy of a Game (Hight)
- CTIN 405 Design and Technology for Mobile (Bleecker)
- CTIN 406 Sound Design for Games ­(Diamante)
- CTIN 488 Game Design Workshop (Swain/Arey/Diamante)
- CTIN 484/489 Intermediate Game Design (Brinson & Fullerton)
- CTIN 491 Advanced Game Project ( Swain)
- CTIN 492 Experimental Game Topics (Bleecker)
- CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity( Production 1) (Kratky)
- CTIN 542 Interactive Experience Design (Bolas)
- CTIN 590 Directed Research - Fisher

and more....

Food and Drink will be provided starting at 5:45.

***SCHEDULE below*****

Speakers: Tom DeFanti, Dan Sandin, Greg Dawe, Todd Margolis, (University of California San Diego/CalIT2, University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory)
Time: Wednesday, April 23, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

"CineGrid: Networked Digital Cinema Challenges"
Tom DeFanti

"VR W/O Attachments"
Dan Sandin

"The Calit2 StarCAVE, a 3rd Generation VR Room"
Greg Dawe

"CRCA: Examples of Collaborative Practice for Large Scale New Media Art Projects"
Todd Margolis

BIOS

Tom DeFanti is an internationally recognized expert in computer graphics since the early 1970s. DeFanti has amassed a number of credits, including: use of EVL hardware and software for the computer animation produced for the 1977 “Star Wars” movie; contributor and co-editor of the 1987 National Science Foundation-sponsored report “Visualization in Scientific Computing;” recipient of the 1988 ACM Outstanding Contribution Award; appointed an ACM Fellow in 1994; and appointed one of several USA technical advisors to the G7 GIBN activity in 1995. He also shares recognition along with EVL director Daniel J. Sandin for conceiving the CAVE™ Virtual Reality Theater in 1991. Currently he is a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). At the University of Illinois at Chicago, DeFanti was director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), a distinguished professor and a distinguished professor emeritus in the department of Computer Science, and the director of the Software Technologies Research Center. Striving for a more than a decade to connect high-resolution visualization and virtual reality devices over long distances, DeFanti has collaborated with Maxine Brown to lead state, national and international teams to build the most advanced production-quality networks available to scientists, with major NSF funding.

Dan Sandin is an internationally recognized pioneer in computer graphics, electronic art and visualization. He is Professor Emeritus of the School of Art & Design, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Director Emeritus of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has worked on a number of inventions such as the Sandin Image Processor (1971-1973), a patch programmable analog computer for real-time manipulation of video inputs through the control of the grey level information. This modular design was based on the Moog synthesizer, the Sayre Glove (1977), the first data glove, as part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a type of VR photography called PHSColograms (1988), a system whereby a number of still images were situated in an auto-stereoscopic manner and back-projected with light. In 1991, in conjunction with Tom DeFanti and graduate students, he designed the CAVE™ Virtual Reality Theater. More recently, he has been working on The Varrier™ Auto-Stereographic Display.

Greg Dawe's unique background mixes mastery in electronics, optics, video technology, material fabrication, computers, and software, complemented by a Florida building contractor’s license acquired in the early 1990s. Dawe holds a BFA in design from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA in video art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, working under Phil Morton, the legendary video artist. Working with colleagues Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin at EVL, Dawe is known for his contributions to the CAVE™ Virtual Reality Theater and its derivatives, the ImmersaDesk™, and PARIS™. The CAVE is a multi-screen, projection-based, virtual-reality system, and the ImmersaDesk is a single-screen, drafting table-style device. Both are commercial products sold by Fakespace Systems (formerly Pyramid Systems Inc.). Dawe also did the mechanical design for and assembled the Varrier™ auto-stereographic display, many large tiled displays and recently a six-wall CAVE (StarCAVE) installed on the ground floor of the UCSD Calit2 building.

Todd Margolis is artist, educator and technologist. He received his MFA in Electronic Visualization from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a founding member of the immersive and interactive art and technology non-profit organization, Applied Interactives, and also a member of the art collaborative Sine::apsis Experiments. Margolis ic currently appointed the Technical Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts(CRCA) at UCSD. Margolis was previously a Visiting Research Programmer at UIC developing a new virtual reality system, The Varrier™ Auto-Stereographic Display with Dan Sandin.

Disney Says Pixar Movies Will Be 3-D



NEW YORK (AP) - The Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday its Pixar animation studio will commit to 3-D by releasing all of it movies in the format beginning with "Up" next year.

Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter made the announcement in New York at a presentation of Disney's upcoming lineup of animated movies.

Box office figures have shown that the enveloping feel of 3-D can attract two to three times more moviegoers who are willing to pay as much as $3 more per ticket, analysts said.

Link

Speakers: Mk Haley, Jill Smolin, and Josh Grow, SIGGRAPH 2008 committee members
Time: Wednesday, April 9, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

This week the CTAN 522 John C Hench Animation & Digital Arts Seminar combines forces with the CTIN 511 Interactive Media Seminar. Our visiting speakers will be three of the committee members for SIGGRAPH 2008 here in LA: Mk Haley, Jill Smolin, and Josh Grow. Jill represents the Animation Festival, Josh represents the Student Volunteer Program, and Mk represents the Interactive Installations. They will talk about the SIGGRAPH conference itself, as well as provide some examples of student submitted work, and a discussion related to how to best submit your work for consideration.

ACM SIGGRAPH's mission is to promote the generation and dissemination of information on computer graphics and interactive techniques and to foster a membership community whose core values help them to catalyze the innovation and application of computer graphics and interactive techniques. Some highlights of the annual conference are its Animation Theater and Electronic Theater presentations, where recently created CG films are played, and an installation of Emerging Technologies that showcases recent work from the crossroads of science, art, and technology and celebrates the best in creativity and innovation from the past year. Dozens of research papers are presented each year, and SIGGRAPH is widely considered the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research. In addition to the papers, there are numerous panels of industry experts set up to discuss a wide variety of topics, from computer graphics to machine interactivity to education. This year, the conference is also co-located with the 3rd annual Sandbox Videogame Symposium.

Speakers: Jonathan Strietzel and John Snoddy, Big Stage Entertainment
Time: Wednesday, April 2, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3-D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, e-mails, social networks and more – instantly. All Big Stage content can then be shared across social networks,mobile phones, and more.

The privately held, Pasadena, Calif.-based company was founded by three tech entrepreneurs who shared a vision for a new media paradigm in which users themselves inhabited the very content which they consumed, and in which the digital fidelity of 3-D animated people -- created and controlled by average consumers -- would soon render virtual performances almost indistinguishable from original performances captured in high-resolution media.

Big Stage’s life-like avatar creation system stems from advanced stereo reconstruction technology funded by multiple government grants, including the CIA, as part of a nineyear cumulative research project at USC. Company Co-Founder Jonathan Strietzel first saw the potential for this technology while meeting with the project’s chief scientist, Doug Fidaleo, Ph.D., at USC. He then assembled Co-Founders Jon Kraft and Jon Snoddy, who each brought unique skills and perspectives to the table, and were able to craft a powerful business vision, secure funding, obtain the core technology license from USC, and hire Fidaleo to officially help bring their vision to life.

Building on the USC research, Chief Technology Officer Snoddy, Chief Scientist Fidaleo and their team were able to take the quality and accuracy of complex, expensive 3-D scanning technology previously only available to production houses and animation companies and offer it to any consumer with a digital camera through a free, fun and easy to use Internet-based platform, for wide-spread entertainment immersion.

BACKCHANNEL LOG from PRESENTATION: Download file

USC Visions and Voices Event:
"Immersion and Its Applications:360 Degrees of Difference"

Join us for an exhibition and panel discussion on 360-degree immersive
explorations in viewing. The exhibition entitled Degrees of Immersion will
include a new multi-screen stereoscopic work by Michael Naimark in
collaboration with the Ars Electronica Future Lab. Other works,
including works by students, will be displayed in the Pano Chamber, a
360-degree pentagonal plasma-screen display that is nine feet in
diameter. Viewers will enter the chamber and be immersed in a
time-based environment.

A dynamic discussion will explore the effectiveness of immersive viewing
and its potential applications for a variety of fields, including fine arts,
psychology and journalism. The distinguished panel of experts will include
multimedia artist Char Davies, founder of the Montreal-based art and
technology company Immersence, Inc.; University of Chicago professor
emerita Barbara Maria Stafford; USC cinematic arts professor
Michael Naimark; USC Annenberg professor Lawrence Pryor;
and USC psychologist and research scientist Albert “Skip” Rizzo.

EXHIBITION:
Monday, February 18 through
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Helen Lindhurst Gallery,
First Floor, Watt Hall

OPENING RECEPTION:
Wednesday, February 20, 5 p.m.

PANEL DISCUSSION:
Wednesday, February 20, 7 p.m.
Leonard Davis Auditorium,
Andrus Gerontology Center

Event website here.