You may be viewing this site with a new theme. Or you may not. Let me know what you think, and any suggestion, in the comments! Your feedback is much appreciated! Why the uncertainty? I am only testing the new theme on some visitors, so you might be lucky or not. Here is a discussion of the tech. setup behind multi-variant testing:
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”.
With the announcement that Twitter will be building in support for latitude/longitude tagging, we are guaranteed a steady flood of points to build our Psycho-Social City.
The following is an example of what is being done with Twitter at the moment, without fine-grain location information:
My research colleague Vinh Nguyen sent me this video of Washington University’s latest image-based reconstruction project (via a New Scientist article “Entire cities recreated from Flickr photos”).
The video shows reconstructed mesh models of the city of Rome. The meshes were constructed using “Structure from Motion“, a “process of finding the three-dimensional structure by analyzing the motion of an object over time”. In this case, the motion is actually the motion of tourists around the city, capturing the same buildings from many different angles. The power of such an approach is that thousands of creative-commons images of a particular city can be retrieved with a quick flickr search.
Read the rest of this entry »
Close your eyes wherever you are, and you may become aware of the aural complexity of the space you’re in. The acoustics, distant sounds of play or belligerence, nature or machinery form a constellation of environmental cues we unconscious incorporate into our sense of a place.
We live in a world which privileges sight, playing on a Western philosophical heritage that scopes out and objectifies the world. While sight affords us a voyeuristic viewpoint separated from the world (could we feel so detached if we could see 360 degrees around us?), sound envelopes us.
Research in the emerging field of acoustical archaeology suggests that ancient temples were designed with sound strongly in mind, and certainly many of them – such as the Chichen Itza in Central Mexico – exhibit extraordinary acoustic qualities. However, contemporary Architecture seems to be driven by an occularcentrism; still no acoustic modelling in architectural packages, while an architecture student friend is told by her lecturer that they work exclusively in the “graphic realm”.
I recently met up with a sound professional turned researcher, Mark Ward, at a conference on interactive entertainment (IE2009). Mark acknowledged the under-appreciated nature of sound, even in cinematographic sound design, and is working to advance the body of knowledge on sound, immersion, and emotion. Of particular interest to me is Mark’s overview of Impulse Response analysis. Impulse Response effectively captures the acoustic signature of a space, by examining the way sounds echo around it. For sound production this means an arbitrary sound can be modelled very accurately as it would sound within the space. For architectural applications this allows a high-quality, cheap, and standard way of recording and archiving the acoustic qualities of a location.
Subscribe to all content
| www.flickr.com |
