Recently, Bruce Sterling featured Voxopolis (below) on his blog. The project extends Conway’s Game of Life into the 3rd dimension in order to evolve a city design. It is one of six presented in the Helvepolis – Urban Design in Vitro! exhibition, showcasing the work of students at ETH in Zurick, studying Masters of Architectural Studies in Computer Aided Architectural Design:
The ETH Masters program looks at “the use of current information technologies as an augmentation of concepts of architecture. [Exploring] new techniques and methods for design that incorporate scripting and programming languages.” As my interest in the use of computer technology in architecture lie in the areas of understanding inhabitants’ spatial practices to inform design, better engineering, and architectural modeling, I am generally quite cynical towards CAAD projects that look cool, but don’t serve actual human bodies. I have given some personal commentary to a few of the CAAD projects. I’d be curious to hear your views.
The small (simulated) depth-of-focus and constant shifting focus helps with convincing the viewer it’s actually real, and it guides the eye across a catalog of gorgeous surfaces. As much as I am concerned with a shift of perception into pure site, when the camera rounds an object and focus slides languidly over it the experience is almost tactile. Perhaps it’s a synesthesial short-circuit?
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The video above is taken from Rubin’s Flash Panorama Laboratory. It is the result of experiments using non-professional commercial cameras to create “the world’s most affordable video solution capable of shooting and virtually recreating all possible viewing directions of the environment”. As you can see, the custom created video player allows you to move around the field of view, and zoom in and out. You can play with it on their site.
It would be interesting to explore the sense of immersion that could be produced by tying this into a head mounted (or even just more directly mouse controlled) interface, with the possibility of recreating recorded first-person experiences a la Johnny Mnemonic.
Following on from my look at image-based reconstruction of the buildings of a city, I want to explore another type of reconstruction; let’s call it psycho-social. While the image-reconstructions build a cloud of architectural feature points, location-tagged micro-blogging allows the formation of a cloud of social/emotional “enunciation points”.
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