Mirage Testing

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Mirage behind projectorA while back, I made a prototype idea for something called the mirage. The mirage is a Wiremap, where the wires are replaced with streams of water. When I came up with it, I imagined it would be ten feet tall - the size of a small room, so that people could dance in it.

I decided instead to start small and work my way up. I've spent the last couple of weeks playing around with plastics - plexiglass, specifically. Fortunately, over in Chinatown, there's this awesome little shop known as the Canal Plastics Center. They sell everything you'd ever need. They also custom build your designs, as well as provide a high precision laser cutting service.

At first, I was excited to just by the raw material and do all the work myself. But after all the testing, it turns out that I have neither the tools nor the knowledge to actually accomplish what I want to accomplish. I tried to drill holes with a drill gun, but they're never perfectly perpendicular - I tried to joint two pieces together, but the jig saw cuts I made can't really compare to their table saw cuts.

I sent off an email earlier today for a quote for a test hunk of plastic. I wanna see how well these cuts can perform.

Wiremap Website!

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Phedhex proudly presents: http://www.phedhex.com/wiremap/

This page leaves me with the satisfying feeling that the Wiremap has a definite home on the net.  It's a concise site with all the info and the media.

Of course, there are updates I'd like to add sometime this week, but it always feels better to update a page that's up than to update an idea floating around in your head.

Anyhow, check it out.

Wiremap 783

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Thought the Wiremap 256 was cool? Try a Wiremap 783! Earlier today I got an email from Elliot Woods, the undergrad at Manchester University who had a couple months back expressed interest in building a mammoth Wiremap. He runs an annual not-for-profit music festival called Pangaea, where they built and shared their work:

Yeah... It's kinda big.

They got the system up and were rendering 3d before the event - but as soon as the subwoofers came on, the projectors jiggled out of alignment, obscuring the 3d image.  Instead, they just threw Milkdrop onto it (musta looked kinda like iTunes on my Wiremap 256... but much bigger, or course).

Seeing photos of a Wiremap this big really inspires me to build more work for it.  Live motion capture could be projected into the Wiremap - so that you could watch a digital image of your body in 3d space.  Or maybe you could play tennis.  Or maybe even 3d machinima?

Projecting Cyberspace onto the Stage

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I'm currently involved in a project that is working on theatricalizing the concept of Avatar and / or Cyberspace. My head has been swimming around this problem for quite some time, and after some good ol' R&D, here's some of what I came up with: [youtube]IfJOshdUhDE[/youtube]

[youtube]HL7LfX5HhiM[/youtube] These ideas are to be seen mostly as a proof of concept, and I think they'll be more compelling when they actually make it on stage.

That said, I think there's a lot of potential for choreography between the human body and digital forms. Yesterday I realized how cool it would be to crossover from machinima into theater. I wonder what that would be called.

Oh, in the vid, I mention my email. Here it is again: hwang [dot] al [at] gmail.

Manchester

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So, since the Digg hit, my wiki entry for the Wiremap got destroyed by spam. I don't know enough php or sql or whatever it is I need to know to recover my document, so I'm considering rebuilding it in a static page. I've been in contact Elliot Woods over in Manchester who is interested in building a very large wiremap for a not for profit music festival, called Pangaea. Last year at Pangaea, they made the world's largest 3d dot matrix display, and this year they're looking to (in my estimation) up the ante.

Email contents include blender, maxmsp, lots of nylon rope, steel frames, and the use of three theater quality projectors.

w00t.