So this goes on the Christmas list...

New prototype high-speed projection mapping system – at CES 2016, Panasonic will unveil its projector technology for high-speed and synchronized mapping on unmarked target objects:



"Prototype." I hope that doesn't mean Christmas 2018...

"Stratford upon Avatar"

(Sorry, couldn't resist nicking the Daily Telegraph's headline.)

Very exciting announcement today by the RSC:

"Today the Royal Shakespeare Company announced a new production of William Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest, produced in collaboration with Intel and in association with leading performance capture company, The Imaginarium Studios. The companies will combine their passion for storytelling and innovation to create a truly revolutionary production as part of the RSC’s winter season 2016.

Directed by RSC Artistic Director, Gregory Doran, with RSC Associate Artist, Simon Russell Beale, as Prospero, and designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis, this partnership will see the RSC’s skills at theatre-making come together with Intel’s digital innovation and the expertise of The Imaginarium in pushing technical boundaries to create a truly innovative production for a new generation to mark Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary.

For the very first time, performance capture technology will be used to render an animated character - Ariel the sprite - live on the Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage.

The technology works by capturing an actor’s facial expressions as well as their movements, which ensures that an actor’s full performance is translated into the animated character. It has most famously been used in films and gaming, but together the RSC, Intel and The Imaginarium have undertaken more than a year of research to bring digital avatars to life on stage in real-time, interacting with live actors."

Intel expands:

"Today the Royal Shakespeare Company announced a new production of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, produced in collaboration with Intel and in association with The Imaginarium Studios. The companies will collaborate to create a revolutionary production as part of RSC's winter season 2016. For the first time, performance capture technology will be used to render an animated character live on the Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage. Standard Intel technology is used to manage massive data processing required for live digital content projection - from Intel Xeon to Intel Core i7 processors."

I heard some tantalizing murmurs about this plan last summer, and can't wait to see what they and The Imaginarium cook up together!

The Telegraph's report is the most extensive so far:

The movement of air

More magic from Adrien M / Claire B in October 2015's Le mouvement de l'air / The movement of air:

A front show designed for three dancers in an immersive environment shaped by projected images. Those are computer-generated for the dancers to play with, making up a digital score performed live by a digital interpreter. The performance matches seemingly impossible visions: images look alive while bodies fly, defying gravity. The acrobatic and digital choreography outlines a body language that involves a new relationship to time, space and the whole world. Beyond looking for technical achievement, what matters is the attempt at creating a motion dreamscape by way of images.

Haiku in motion

La compagnie Adrien M / Claire B presented Hakanaï at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Vancouver last Friday. Those of us who couldn't see it live will have to be content with the trailer:


Hakanaï / trailer from Adrien M / Claire B

PS: I do love what these guys do...


Le mouvement de l'air: Work in progress from Adrien M / Claire B


XYZT - 2015 from Adrien M / Claire B

What's New, Pussycat?

The moment I saw our Bottom up, I figured it was a matter of months till we saw the Cheshire Cat mocapped on stage. And here it is! The one thing I can't tell from these videos is whether the motion capture is live or pre-recorded.

Lysander Ashton of 59 Productions talked with The Guardian about wonder.land's visual inspirations, and also touched on the question of capture:

Q: Will you be making any technological innovations? 

A: We’ll be using quite a lot of motion-capture, which is quite new and novel in a theatrical environment, if not in a film-making one. Because there are going to be moments where the actor onstage interacts with a projected character, we’re going to have a motion-capture suit in the rehearsal room and have the scene played out between the two actors.

That sounds like it might possibly be pre-recorded, but I'm still not sure. I'll keep digging to see if I can find more in-depth intel on the making-of.






On a not unrelated note, fellow Manchester International Festival artist Ed Atkins explains his more conceptual Performance Capture to Aesthetica magazine.

(hat tip to Ryan Porter and Alan McLaughlin)

One step closer to the Holodeck...

Connected Worlds by studio Design I/O: a large scale immersive, interactive ecosystem developed for the New York Hall of Science.

"The installation is comprised of six interactive ecosystems spread out across the walls of the Great Hall and connected together by a 3000 sqft interactive floor and a 45ft high waterfall. Visitors can use physical logs to divert water flowing across the floor from the waterfall into the different environments, where children can then use their hands to plant seeds. As the different environments bloom creatures appear based on the health of the environment and the type of plants growing in it. If multiple environments are healthy creatures will migrate between them causing interesting chain reactions of behaviours. 

"The installation is designed to encourage a systems thinking approach to sustainability where local actions in one environment may have global consequences. Children work with a fixed amount of water in the system and have to work together to manage and distribute the water across the different environments. Clouds return water from the environments to the waterfall which releases water to the floor when it rains."

(h/t Nick Pagee!)






Stills after the break...

Full-length video of The Augmentalist at AWE 2015

This live presentation, the grand finale at last week's Augmented World Expo 2015, features Pascal Langdale as "The Augmentalist", with real-time animation powered by Dynamixyz Performer.

The eight-minute demo is followed by a four-minute behind-the-scenes talk by Pascal Langdale (performer, co-writer, producer) and Alison Humphrey (director, co-writer, producer) about The Augmentalist and the 2014 project that informed it, Faster than Night.



This story didn't actually start here, though. 

The previous day, our "augmented mentalist" worked his digital psychic mojo one-on-one with any visitor who stopped by our fortune-telling booth on the Expo floor. For more details, see these photos from the expo floor, and this teaser trailer:



And throughout the Expo's last day, leading up to his presentation as the grand finale, The Augmentalist introduced several keynote speakers, starting with the grandfather of VR and AR, Tom Furness:



Followed by renowned science-fiction author David Brin:




And finally Google Project Tango lead Johnny Lee:



Aug-ust company!

---

The Augmentalist

Presented June 10th 

at Augmented World Expo 2015 

in Silicon Valley, California.

Performed and co-written by Pascal Langdale

Directed and co-written by Alison Humphrey

Facial capture operator Solène Morvan

Performance capture powered by Dynamixyz

Facial animation by Centaur Digital and Dynamixyz

Produced by Motives in Movement

in collaboration with Dynamixyz and Augmented World Expo 2015

With development support from

Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH programme

and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council

Photos of The Augmentalist at AWE 2015

Pics from Augmented World Expo... Huge thanks to Ori Inbar, Tom Emrich, Gal Yaguri and the whole AWE 2015 team for three incredible days of futurevision!

Augmented World Expo Day 3: "Inspire" (AWE via Flickr)

Pascal Langdale "in camera" (AWE via Flickr)

Augmented World Expo @ARealityEvent: "Have you had your devices read yet? Check out the Augmentalist, a digital psychic #AWE2015 #AR"

Kara Platoni @KaraPlatoni: "The Augmentalist advised me to be true to my adaptability and that the future would be rosy indeed. #AWE2015"

Sean White @seanwhite: "Looking behind the curtain at the @ARealityEvent #awe2015"

Augmented World Expo @ARealityEvent: "Our digital psychic the Augmentalist reads Tom Furness @VRWorldSociety #AWE2015"

Augmented World Expo @ARealityEvent: "Johnny Lee of Google Project Tango talking to the Augmentalist #AWE2015"

Kevin Arthur @karthur: "Black Mirror time at #awe2015?"

Augmented World Expo @ARealityEvent: "The Augmentalist finale is live #AWE2015"

Augmented World Expo @ARealityEvent: "Just witnessed the grand finale with the death of The Augmentalist #AWE2015"

Augmented World Expo @ARealityEvent: "The team behind The Augmentalist @alisonhum @pascallangdale #AWE2015"

Synetic Theater Gets Wet Wet Wet

I need to see this company live. At first I thought the water was a projected digital effect (as in Crystal Pite's The Tempest Replica), but nope – those folks are soaked!

Synetic Theater's The Tempest – multimedia design by Riki K.






(Hat tip to Matthew Olwell)

Trailer for the Augmentalist at AWE 2015

If you happen to be in Silicon Valley tomorrow, drop by Augmented World Expo for a fortune-telling session with The Augmentalist!



Animated using Dynamixyz Performer Realtime
http://www.dynamixyz.com/

Performed by Pascal Langdale
http://www.pascallangdale.com/

Directed by Alison Humphrey
http://www.alisonhumphrey.com/

Written by Alison Humphrey & Pascal Langdale

Interactive Fiction and Fan Transmedia, Circa 1997

Today I belatedly discovered on Gizmodo a happy little history of a project I worked on back at the dawn of the interwebs: "The Secret Douglas Adams RPG That People Have Been Playing for 15 Years."

In the mid-'90s I worked as the web producer for The Digital Village, a multimedia company whose first product was a CD-ROM game titled (in the grammatically clunky but franchise-forward marketing spirit of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell) Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic.



During the many moons the game was in development, we decided to help Douglas's fans cope with the suspense by creating a series of in-fiction websites – which eventually turned out to be one of the earliest examples of an alternate reality game.

The intergalactic travel agency website Starlight Travel was the first chapter, written by Michael Bywater and coded by Yoz Grahame. We then popped that propaganda with the "accidental" leak of a password to the Star-Struct Inc. (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Starlight Lines Corp.) Starship Titanic Construction Intranet. Yoz slapped together a rudimentary "StarStruct Employee Forum", the party started, and it's been fan-fiction-tastic for going on two decades since.

As long-time forum inhabitant Carolyn Wilborn wrote to Yoz when the site was in danger of falling victim to the dot-com bust:

Many, and maybe most, people watch TV to relax. They want to be told a story. All of this is well and good, but in my experience with the Forum, I saw something far more interesting. While the producers and programmers work to find a way for us to play with their creations, we are busy building our own. The StarStruct Employee Forum is interactive fiction. We didn't sit around and discuss what the game will be like or how we liked the book. We created characters, we put them on the ship, we invented storylines and conflicts, and we wrote a kind of story. It was often chaotic and frustrating, but it was (is) great.

I've been thinking a lot about this kind of interactive storytelling lately, with a project in the works aiming to mash up live theatre, interactive digital effects, and online co-creation. But when you're cooking up something new, it's always good to be reminded that we didn't start the fire...