Just got back from the Design Exchange (DX) where they held the launch of the digital/tech/arts exhibit WILD, the last part of the DigiFest series of events co-hosted by DX, the Harbourfront Centre and the OSC. I spent the time between eating the veggies and those delicious pseudo-potstickers served in wine glasses, chatting with Paola and other former co-workers at DX/DXNET, and exploring the various exhibits in the medium-sized exhibit area. This will be on display in the publicly accessible ground floor for an entire month until July, so feel free to visit them if you ever pass near the Bay/King downtown financial core area.

Kora, an artist from Belgium stood beside the two large hi-def flat-panel displays showing a virtual 3D environment, each with an on-screen avatar controlled by a computer keyboard and mouse on a table to navigate the same 3D world. The whole installation was part of a project in which live video of an event could be played in the virtual world, and that the ideal installation should have been actual projection screens boxing the user on all sides for a more complete immersive experience. I learned that the nVIDIA video card could handle the three screens, so long as you attach an additional adaptor to allow three VGA outputs for the three projectors. Found out that the 3D environment was created using Quake editor and 3D Studio Max, so I then wondered how they got a live video stream to play in Quake - it was a custom mod they coded. Nearly all of the usual Quake controls were absent, and navigation was done using the mouse controls.

This exhibit was particularly interesting for me because I’ve done similar work back in 2000, when Adobe released a beta authoring software for creating online 3D multi-user worlds called Adobe Atmosphere. It took an annoyingly long time to create, and the interact-able geometry had to be very primitive but I did manage to create a virtual art gallery for my renaissance art presentation as well as a virtual island for my end-of-year project. Now that I’ve seen Kora’s project, if I ever need to create a 3D multi-user world again then I will very likely look at using Quake, Unreal editor or some other well-established game modding-related tools due to their rich graphical features, ready-built interactivity features and general stability.

The other great exhibit was the Tom Tompson-themed rear-projection onto a painter’s canvas in which you used the painter’s brush on the canvas and the projected image of a Tom Thomspon image responded as if you were actually painting, building up the layers of the painting. The creators were a group of four who had met each other as students at the Canadian Film Centre. I noticed an ordinary SONY video camera aimed at the back side of the canvas, and connected to a Mac computer. I also noticed the camera had some kind of black filter, so I asked what it was and found out it was the magnetic disk from a floppy disk, serving as a makeshift infra-red filter. I asked further about how the infra-red comes into play in detecting the user’s brush location, and Trevor the one who set up the brush explained that there was an infra-red emitter embedded inside the brush head. USB supplied the power, which I remember is 5Volts. So it was this hidden infra-red emitter and the filtered video camera that allowed the computer to detect the user’s brush location and update the projected canvas image accordingly. Very neat.

All in all a great evening.

Then on the way home I saw another neat piece of technology, although this one was a mass-produced consumer product - an Ambush Warrior mountain board. My first time seeing a mountain board, which the girl explained was like a snowboard on wheels. I prefer to see it as a skateboard on wheels. I took a few pictures before getting off the subway car.

Tip about Doors Open Toronto: For this event happening this weekend in which historic or culturally important buildings all over Toronto are open to the public, one way to easily map out and find out what buildings are open in any particular area of interest is to use google maps, loaded to Toronto, ON and then local search type in the Doors Open Toronto buildings listings url (http://www.doorsopen.org/building/ ) and presto - you now have a custom map to plan your day. For some reason, the Toronto-Dominion Centre at Bay/King, which features a spectacular view of the whole city from the top 54th floor, does not seem to get plotted on Google maps. But most of the other ones get plotted so it can still be useful.

Picture on the right: Those delicious pseudo-potsticker things served in empty wine glasses at the exhibit opening event.