70 Billion Pixels Budapest: 360 degree panorama image
"The observation tower of János-hegy [the Elizabeth Lookout on János Hill is], the highest vantage point of Budapest with a 360 degree panorama, was an obvious location. It also allowed us to take on previous world records in both the 'highest definition image' and the 'largest spherical panorama' category. When contacted, the Council of District XII informed us on the upcoming anniversary of the tower. We agreed to cooperate in commemorating the September 2010 event by setting up new world records-give them our best shot if you please. ."
(360systems Ltd., 360world.eu)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Blur Building: Anti high-definition and visual fidelity
"The Blur Building was built for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel. It is an architecture of atmosphere. The lightweight tensegrity structure measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 75 feet high. The primary building material is indigenous to the site, water. Water is pumped from the lake, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through 31,500 high-pressure mist nozzles. A smart weather system reads the shifting climactic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and processes the data in a central computer that regulates water pressure.
Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased, leaving only an optical 'white-out' and the 'white-noise' of pulsing nozzles. Blur is an anti-spectacle. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself."
(Diller Scofidio + Renfro)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
360 Panoramic Video Capture and Recording
"You have probably seen several times in the past, those immersive digital photographs in which you can easily look up and down and turn your vision all around in full 360° glory. The 360° panoramic new year's eve of 2003 in Times Square, New York, has been one of my first memorable favorites, as it captures so well the thousands of emotions and different people celebrating on the street at once.
But video technology is now surpassing even these spectacular capabilities, by delivering navigable 3D, immersive video which as good or better than the 360° navigable images you and I have seen until now.
Check this video out. Once it starts rolling, click and move your mouse in different directions. You will be surprised to see that you can now fully navigate also inside moving video images.
The visual impact is really quite shocking, especially if, this is the very first time you are in front of a 3D, immersive and fully navigable video.
This spectacular feat is achieved by utilizing eleven video streams arranged according in a geodesic fashion. By doing so it is possible to capture an almost complete spherical image; a high-resolution 360 degree view of surroundings that is seamlessly stitched together.
Immersive navigable 3D movies can integrate GIS coordinates and other metadata to create highly informative, educational or life-saving emergency and assistance video guides.
The company behind this impressive new media technology is Immersive Media Corp., based in Calgary, Canada. The company also owns the wholly-owned subsidiary Immersive Media Company, based in Portland, Oregon.
The dodecahedron, with its twelve symmetrical pentagonal facets, is the most natural geometric division of a sphere for immersive image capture. It offers symmetrical, standardized divisions of the sphere that make the most of the image produced by each lens, and produces even resolution in every direction, better blending of the images, and more even illumination of the overall scene.
Perfectly equal and parallel faces, edges and corner angles, and divisions according to the Golden Ratio: A/B=(A+B)/A
It is the most natural geometric division of a sphere for immersive video image capture. It produces:
The enormous number of pixels recorded enables the highest image quality in every direction. The result is consistent image resolution across the entire spherical frame, with photographic realism and full motion.
Over 100 million pixels per second are recorded, resulting in spherical frames of 2400x1200 pixels, 30 frames per second. With the Telemmersion System, software is not required to correct sub-standard image resolution.
Images may be viewed spherically using the IMViewer software for looking around, or in an overall panoramic sphere movie format utilizing standard video playback platforms such as Windows Media® Player or QuickTime®."
(Edited by: Luigi Canali De Rossi)
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Suttana KeyuraphanSHARE
wj-s.org: weejays, webjays, webjockeys ...
"the World Wide Web [has become] a space of converging multimedia praxis, has become a vast experimentation and exploration ground with countless artistic ramifications. As it is often related to a solitary adventure led in a very intimate relationship with one's machine, the virtual experience is seldom extended to another dimension of time-space. Projects involving network actors only take place in closed circles, within the network, and hardly ever outside, within a live performance environment. The idea of the WJ's project is to disrupt this tendency by offering a strong, captivating, sensual and slightly altered cybernetic surf where the feeling of being immerged in the flow and the extreme pleasure of browsing are shifted to a live performance environment. Individual and collaborative online productions (in different geographical sites) become collective events (to which an audience is invited). In this way, Wjs become flux stalkers and offer things to see, hear, feel, observe and think about, through a progressive and dynamic process. Guided by their critical spirit and their own personal outlook, they reveal the fragrance of the Web, defragment and confront worlds that make the invisible become visible."
(Anne Roquigny)
Fig.1 WJ-S Performance Alessio Chierico
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Einstein’s Brain Project: revealing the constructed nature of immersive virtual reality
"If there is a single general expectation of the recent advances in the technologies of virtual reality and hyper-interactive simulation it is that of its capacity to present an ever-increasing realism. The quest for seamlessly reproduced worlds is paramount in the military and institutional development of the simulation technologies. The ideal (achievable or otherwise) of immersive virtual reality consists of surrounding an individual with images, sounds and behaviours so apparently like those of the real world that the body and consequently the brain is fooled into thinking it is in that world. These developing strategies are those of realism rid of expression, symbol or metaphor and they are sustained by the authorities of homogeneity and seamlessness. Just as long rendering times and their outcome of low frame rates are constantly, and expensively, fought against because they disturb the seamlessness and the effectiveness of the illusion so ruptures in the content and the consumption of the worlds are discouraged. Stopping to consider the strangeness of a sound distorted by being played too slowly or the flickering or jerkiness of an image disrupts our sense of ourselves as being in normal relations with a world. Similarly the consideration of a subtext or a hidden meaning draws attention to our consideration and away from the construction and sustenance of our normal relationship to the world. One must see these contemporary desires as linked to a history of naturalism, its concurrent dualistic pairing of reality and appearance and the authority and correctness of institutional space."
(Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow, Morley Hollenberg)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
