The people over at Obscura Digital pulled off another nice piece of installation. Using their own multi-touch software and combining it with the holographic projection technology of Musion’s Eyeliner 3D System they created quite some magic. If you look closely at the end you can see that the operator has tiny LED lamps in his hands that, if i’m guessing correctly, light up once he squeezes them, which then will create a blob for the system to recognzie. 

via Engadget

When I first saw the ‘augmented sculpture’ at the ARS Electronica in 2007, I did the same thing as nearly everyone else did, who went in to this small room there. I immediately went out again and photographed the name of the artist from the board outside (Pablo Valbuena) with my mobile phone. Then I went in again and stayed there for a long long time.

Actually projections onto a 3D object in real space are nothing new at all, but we all know that holding a crayon doesn‘t make one necessary an artist. And Pablo is one of these people who are able to create an impressive piece of art just out of few minimalistic elements. The way he puts the virtual geometry on his physical sculpture is just amazing. The hypnotising sound environment and the perfectly choreographed virtual object transformation gave me the impression of being in a kind of a ‘Tron’ World.

I am happy that Pablo continued his work and hope to see some new versions of the ‘augmented sculpture’ in real ’space-time’ soon again!

We all know it from the movies and science fiction stories. But it seems that holographic projections are not longer future talk anymore, they have been around for a while and their quality increases constantly. The Musion Eyeliner 3D Holographic Projection System is one of the popular systems, and it certainly does a lot of faking (well, the 3D is more like a catch phrase, because they only use one projector and single lens cameras to film the content but place it in a 3-dimensional set of “foils”), but the effect is still stunning, and on their showreel website they have very nice reference clips to look at.

Very often you are challenged to create high impact visuals with an unappropriate budget. I guess Peter Felzman from Monte Video is pretty familiar with these requests. He did a decent job for a permanent exhibition at the Admont monastery and created a virtual room housing a video sphere. This may be trivia for some of you vvvv-geeks, but surprisingly he achieved this effect by just using rear projection and four pyramidal arranged mirrors.

Long live simplicity!!