Lumarca (one of the child projects of the Wiremap), had a great showing at Maker Faire, New York, this past weekend. The project got a lot of positive attention, including 3 Blue Ribbons (I guess each editor of the magazine gets to give out one).
The project also claimed the “Red Bull Create the Future” award. It totally took Matt and me by surprise when a couple of Red Bull representatives came by to shake our hands.
What exactly is this prize? A MakerBot!
We’re taking the momentum that Maker Faire has generated and using it to fuel our fundraising campaign. The funds we raise will go towards developing a DIY kit and doing research and development for bigger and better volumetric renderers.
Please consider donating if you want to see a new tomorrow for volumetric renderers:
When I was attending the ITP Summer Camp, I went to a session at NYU’s Motion Capture (Mocap) studio. As much as I had been around the 3d digital world, I had never seen a Mocap studio in person. I was so enamored by the technology I signed up to help volunteer.
Well, the professor sent an email blast out to these would-be volunteers, telling people about a class he was teaching. Unfortunately I’m no longer an NYU student, so I thought there’d be a slim chance that I’d be able to attend this class. Well, after a number of emails he said it’d be fine if I audited the course.
Class last week was pretty cool! There’s a lot of really incredible technology that I really can’t wait to get my hands on.
The class is project- / research-based, and I’ve got an idea that I’m really excited to start working on. I wanted to take this opportunity to start building this interaction (only the stuff from 2:24 – 2:39):
This week, I finally broke out my Arduino and used it for one of my projects. Here’s a look at what I built:
It should go without saying that I’m a total n00b when it comes to hardware. All that mess of wires is just for one button. I should also note how awesome I am at stitching a button to a glove… man, I really need to figure out a prettier way to do this…
But whatever, that’s not the point. The point is that now I’ve got a button. I’ve got a button and motion tracking tools… now I just need a display.
Instead of spending my life trying to apply for / track down / fabricate an AR headset, I’m just going to cheat using head tracking and a responsive 2d display. This video, published by Johnny Chung Lee, has been floating around for quite a while now, and it transforms a 2d screen into a pseudo 3d experience:
With my glove button + real time hand tracking + head tracking, I plan on using the main idea from the video above to make something that behaves more like Spatial Computing – complete with the ability to select and manipulate 3d models in real / pseudo real 3d space.
One of the most exciting aspects of interface design is the process of constructing new perspectives — discovering new frameworks that help explain how we behave, what our expectations are, and how they are met. Constantly analyzing and re-evaluating behavior and expectations helps identify good design patterns – and identifying good design patterns makes way for creating new, engaging designs.
To give a specific example, back when I was drafting the foundational ideas for Spatial Computing, I needed to wrap my brain around what a “3d interface design” meant and how it would work. I figured that a good way to do this would be to take a look at the interaction design paradigm that exists for things before 3d input — all types of input from 2d to 0d. Here’s what I came up with:
I was just in the shower and I made a huge realization:
I am focusing all my creative energy in the wrong places.
See, I would consider myself a thinker, a doer and maker. I’m an inventor, a designer and engineer. But looking at my life lately, I’ve been spending a majority of my energy trying to be something that I’m not — a brand.
This desire for a brand identity comes from an honest place. A year or two ago I began scaling back my work because I felt like it wasn’t really getting me where I wanted it to. I had expectations that I was an artist, and as such, I needed to do artist behaviors and have artist things. The logic being that doing this would get me into some important gallery or some cool press attention.
So I tried to design a brand and I built a website. I went to more events and started schmoozing. I started to dump a disproportionately large chunk of my energy into inflating this identity of “Phedhex” with the idea that this could be a brand that could get me things.
First off, many many thanks to everybody who submitted. Matt & I received lots photos and are really impressed by the quality of the photos! It was pretty difficult to finally decide on a winner, but here ya go:
& the winner is:
(Please click on the photos to view full size… these thumbnails don’t really do the photos justice)
What a beauty! Crisp, bright, and nicely saturated. Matt and I also liked how it gave a good sense of size while still managing to evoke what it feels like to be standing there seeing the whole thing.
I’d also like to post a few of the many others that were also being considered for the prize:
This was shot by Tim Szetela. Tim had an entire set of very high quality photographs (and a number of videos of the animations).
This cool little animated gif was done by Corey Menscher. Gives a good sense of space & depth. (you have to click through to see the animation).
And lastly: Matt Parker (the other guy on this project) took this shot. Looks good. He wasn’t actually considered for the prize money, but I figured I’d share this photo w/ you all anyhow. : )
The redesign includes a couple of cool new features. Most notably, the old… uh… plain design, has been updated to this cool, new hex design. This includes visual updates all across the site, including the mailing list page, the about page, and the empty splash page.
plain white, courier new... glad to see some color now...
The second thing the new site has that the old site sort of didn’t is a project index page. I compiled all the work I’ve done and placed it in the projects page. It may still need reworking as time goes on, but I’m pretty happy with it so far.
One of the things I noticed when building the projects page is that I had never uploaded any footage from The Imhotep Project. So I uploaded it and listed it in the projects page.
Lastly, the comments on blog posts or project pages are post it notes. I think that’s pretty darn cool. I had to do some minor PHP coding to allow the commenter to pick out which color post it they wanted to use, but I think it was totally worth it.
Then you’d be interested to know that colleague Matt Parker and I built one that’s roughly 8 feet tall, 10 wide, and 8 deep. We were initially going to just document it for ourselves, but construction went so quickly we found we had some extra time to do a little exhibiting.
So if you wanna see a room-sized volumetric renderer, the exhibition is open at ITP Thursday and Friday from 7:00 – 10:00.
Additionally, in the interest of getting some awesome photos, $50 and a props in the blog goes to whoever sends me the best photo of the event!
Directions to ITP:
Take the RW to 8th or the 6 train to Astor Place.
4th floor of 721 Broadway (south of 8th st, btn Waverly & Washington).
So back in the day I got a awarded a residency over at Media Lab NYC, run by the kind people at Room 404 Media. I decided to use the time to test out some work for my (then) upcoming show “The Market Value of Monkeys and Robots“. Here’s footage of a majority of the work that we created:
Muchos Gracias to Kate, Dave, Corey, Morgan, Drew, Ilana, Andrew, Jill, Hoke, and anybody who lent a hand to make this performance & installation possible.
So Spatial Computing made a bit of a splash in the AR community, and I’ve been getting some really great feedback from a lot of people. In fact, I even got invited to talk about the work at arconf!
It’s a 10 minute talk – so I’m trying to really pare down what I need to talk about. I’ve brain stormed a lot of stuff that can’t possibly fit into 10 minutes — here are a few things I want to cover:
A clear definition of Spatial Computing, and how it is related to AR
Some way to demonstrate how this interface paradigm operates
The culture of the screen — and how it interfaces with the human body
The culture of 3d (dance, theater, etc…) and what tools we can borrow
How to use 3d composition and narrative design to evoke visceral emotions in a human body
Why AR companies should be hiring dancers
How to approach 3d as a creative medium, and why approaching 3d from 2d is simply wrong
Where VR is today and how it got there
I think my next step (after a site redesign… bout half way done…) is building / collecting visual material and physical gestures to help demonstrate what I’m talkin about.
Okay, admittedly this took way longer than I had originally expected. I’m pretty happy with the results, and have been getting some decent feedback – so cool!
Also, I’d like to take this space to acknowledge everything out there that made this project possible:
Blender, the blender community, and especially super3boy‘s blender tutorials.
So some people have been asking me how I did it – if I used AR toolkit or whatever. This project was almost exclusively made with Premiere and Blender, with lots of help from Google Sketchup and After Effects.
The workflow was this
Storyboard and script the concepts that I wanted to explain
Measure out the irl room (measuring tape, paper)
Place the camera in the room and measure it’s location (measuring tape, paper)
Record footage of me talking in an empty room
Model the room and cameras in Blender
Place the digital camera in the model of the room (Blender)
Build out the 3d models that I wanted in the room (Blender)
Paint the walls of the digital room Bright green (Blender)
Export render from Blender
Import into Premiere and greenscreen the footage.
Superimpose my body (for shots where I occlude the footage) on top of the Blender footage
Add effects, like alpha glows and the line that pops outa my finger (that was done in After Effects)
Add Sound
???
Profit!
Lastly – Why am I doing this?
*hoists self up on soap box*
Here’s the deal – AR is awesome. I feel like I’m preaching to the choir when I say that someday in the not too distant future AR will be in our lives. But what are those next steps? How do we begin to introduce AR consumer electronics into the mainstream market?
The way I see it, the biggest problem isn’t that we lack the ingenuity or the engineering resources to make this happen. The biggest problem is that from a mainstream perspective, AR isn’t fun yet, it’s still just an engineering experiment.
The best way to get AR consumer electronics into the mainstream market is to make AR approachable and exciting. It’s to convince the everyday person that AR is not just an experiment, but a tool that could actually be useful to them in their daily lives. Something that could excite their perfectly natural and instinctive desires to physically stand in the same room with things (in this case, digital content).
So I decided to use the term “spatial computing” over “augmented reality” because I believe it is a more approachable term. From an outsider’s point of view, “augmented reality” almost suggests that reality is subpar or otherwise inadequate, “spatial computing,” on the other hand, simply describes a computer intelligent enough to communicate spatially.
And that’s why I’m building these videos – because I want to get people excited about what’s soon to come. I want to generate interest from the ground up. For computing paradigm shifts this big (the computer mouse has been around for over 50 years!), we’re going to need to swing a lot of cultural momentum.
**Update 2**
Actually, I take it back… sort of.
As I discovered in while writing my reply to this post over at augmx, the reason I use the term “spatial computing” is because it’s actually different from “augmented reality.” In short, spatial computing is the activity of using a computer with 3d space as your main point of interface, while augmented reality is the layering of digital information over real world things. Seriously, go read my reply to that post over there if you want to geek out with me over semantics.
The relative approachability of the terms, I believe, has to do with the approachability of the ideas they identify. Almost everybody has experience computing, and absolutely everybody has experience with space. It stands to reason (I’d hope) that these people would be able to pretty clearly and immediately understand what spatial computing means.
