Posts filed under 'Virtual'
Great Quote I thought I’d put on since I was recently asked what the relationship between cyberspace and interactive architecture is.
Cyberspace, RIP by Karl Schroeder from Future Now
“It’s this overlay of the virtual over the real that makes the cyberspace metaphor obsolete. Cyberspace, after all, is conceived as something like the astral plane–a digital reality that exists “elsewhere.” But it’s precisely this “elsewhere” that’s being eroded by applications like Davison and Reid’s augmented reality system. Increasingly, the digital world is being married to the real world, with surprising results.
My personal theory is this: when the only way to use a computer was to sit still and look through a little window (the screen) into a virtual space, the cyberspace metaphor worked best for us. But with cell phones, PDAs and geographical applications such as store-finders and the proposed “taxi” key for cell phones (which simply summons the nearest cab when you press it), we’re no longer staring through a window into cyberspace. The window’s been broken, and the cyber world has spilled out into our own space.”
December 21st, 2005
SONIA CILLARI discribes herself as a digital architect, her projects explore digital architectural models which can be viewed online in interactive 3D.
“These projects explore the application of dynamic methods to design architectural models in digital environments.
Against the rationalist notion of objective space, the aim is to investigate implications of architectural form in relation to space and time multidirectional parameters, considering digital spatiality an environment not receiving but instead generator of forms.
Computer parameters are not-critical parameters, selected with intuitive criteria. They affront not-critically the opposition between form and void, to eliminate in the design process the memory of architectonic hierarchical organization.” And they’re pretty too!
VIEW interactive digital spaces
You will need Cosmoplayer to view.
December 7th, 2005
Here’s HMC Medialab’s Lacuna Project which is up and running at the Portland Square Building in Plymouth, UK.
Lacuna is a response to the relationship between body and architecture in the cyborg era. Existing in the perceived ‘gap’ between physical volume and electronic volume, Lacuna is customised software that communicates between the visual medium of the screen and a high resolution electronic skin of real world architecture. This in turn creates virtual counterpart architecture, enhancing the electronic Cybrid dimension of construction.
Lacuna is a new architectural experiment that allows physical architecture to extend itself into the realm of zero physicality to become a Hyperflexible Space. Movement, temperature, gasses, wind, sound, data, water usage, electrical information, fans, and lift position are among a few of the hundreds of sensors used to alter the Lacuna software in real-time, allowing a unique representation of the building not in traditional space and time or virtual electronic space, but somewhere between the two.
Visitors to Plymouth’s unique Portland Square building interact not through the key-press, or mouse-click associated with computing, but their very presence, or lack of presence, and usage of the building is converted into electronic signals. This, for the first time, allows visitors to exist simultaneously in the real and the virtual, they are everywhere and nowhere. Lacuna is in a constant state of flux, and intelligently updates, modifies and mutates itself many times a second.
November 28th, 2005
Using image warping of a projection based on viewer perspective it is possible to extend a physical space with virtual projections that respond to your movement. Using view-dependent image-based and geometric warping, radiometric compensation, and multi-focal projection these guys have developed an interesting approach to merging the physical with the virtual.
Video
Such an approach does not only offer new possibilities for augmented reality and virtual reality, but also allows merging both technologies. This potentially gives some application domains – like architecture – the possibility to benefit from the conceptual overlaps of AR and VR. From Future Feeder
November 21st, 2005
An ‘Operating System’ for contemporary architecture (Arch-OS, ’software for buildings’) has been developed to manifest the life of a building and provide artists, engineers and scientists with a unique environment for developing transdisciplinary work and new public art.
Arch-OS is a current attempt by the Institute of Digital Art & Technology www.i-dat.org (My old haunt) by members of the School of Computing, Communications and Electronics at the University of Plymouth to develop the evolution in intelligent architecture, interactive art and ubiquitous computing.
Here are the projects so far and here’s one that always gets a good reaction, the ‘Random Lift Button’.
Arch-OS systems (integrated hardware and software) available through this site incorporate a range of embedded technologies to capture audio-visual and raw digital data from a building through a variety of sources which include:
• the ‘Building Energy Management System (BEMS);
• computer and communications networks;
• the flow of people and social interactions;
• ambient noise levels;
• environmental conditions.
October 28th, 2005
2 really nice pieces that are interested in the visualisation of invisible flows of information. These two aesthetic and sensory observatories for the perception of this parallel reality have been developed by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman in collaboration with the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria.
The Hidden Worlds of Noise and Voice is an interactive audiovisual installation, or, alternatively, an augmented-reality speech-visualization system. Its central theme is the magical relationship of speech to the ethereal medium which conveys it. Participants in Hidden Worlds are able to “see” each others’ voices, which are made visible in the form of animated graphic figurations that appear to emerge from the participants’ mouths while they speak. In the installation, visitors wear special see-through data glasses, which register and superimpose 3D graphics into the real world. When one of the users speaks or sings, colorful abstract forms appear to emerge from his or her mouth. The graphics representing these utterances assume a wide variety of shapes and behaviors that are tightly coupled to the unique qualities of the vocalist’s volume, pitch and timbre.
RE:MARK is an installation for two participants which likewise presents an interactive visualization of its users’ speech. Unlike Hidden Worlds, which primarily attends to the noiselike aspects of vocal sounds, RE:MARK shifts this inquiry towards the more symbolic domain of the spoken and written word.
In RE:MARK, sounds spoken into a pair of microphones are analyzed and classified by a phoneme recognition system. When a phoneme is recognized with sufficient confidence, the written name of the phoneme (for example, oh, ee, ah, etc.) is projected on the installation’s display. If the user’s sound is not recognized by the system’s classifier, then an abstract shape is generated instead, based directly on the timbral characteristics of the vocalization.
As the visitor speaks, the corresponding written phonemes and abstract forms are rendered as silhouettes, and appear to emerge from the shadow of the speaker’s head. A computer-vision system permits the visitors to sweep these forms across the screen with the shadow of their body. The result is a playful and revelatory illusion, in which the installation’s visitors become actors in a shadow world of reactive cartoon language.
October 20th, 2005
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