#3d interaction

Living Timeline, a project we started in June last year, has finally launched as part of At-Bristol's new exhibit "Our World - No More Waste", sponsored by Sita Trust.

Living Timeline brings the last 460 million years of evolutionary development to life, with creatures ranging from spiders, beetles and snails, through ammonites and trilobites to sharks and dinosaurs inhabiting a Mixed Reality ecosystem.

The creatures are projected onto a physical 3D landscape measuring 4.6m. Like Glowing Pathfinder Bugs, creatures sense their landscape, and the presence of visitors, through the use of Kinect stereo camera sensors, and they respond accordingly by flying off, panicking and running away, crawling up your arm or being splattered to death by rampant children.

  Also, see this on the At-Bristol site; it includes a brief video description/interview about the project.

The project is part of a group of projects that have explored and extended the ideas behind Glowing Pathfinder Bugs (2008), an artwork that projects caterpillars onto a sandpit. Other related projects include Pest Control I and Pest Ctrl II - a full body experience recently shown at Phoenix Square, Leicester UK.

These projects all use simple projection mapping techniques to create convincing forms of spatially coherent Mixed Reality experience; making the digital world feel as though it exists within our own physical reality, rather than looking through a window/screen into a parallel yet untouchable universe.

Living Walls is a permanent exhibition, and the first exhibit you come to just through the entrance at At-Bristol. It is estimated that the project will be seen by over a million people in the next few years.

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The Future is Now! Leap is an amazing piece of technology that is a good competitor to the Microsoft Kinect. Currently the website is down but there is enough to take from the video. By the way if you don't want to ready my article and just want to go ahead and pre-order is at a very affordable price of $69.99--$75.98 with shipping.

Leap is a motion tracking piece of hardware that is compatible with Windows 7/8 and Mac OS X--Linux coming soon. You simply plug it in by USB and install software and probably after a quick calibration, it's ready to use. It is made to be a full keyboard and mouse replacement. It should work amazingly well with Windows 8. Livemotion claims "it's 200x more sensitive than existing touch-free products and technologies" and "creates a 3D interaction space of 8 cubic feet." Eight cubic feet is a little smaller than the Kinect's camera range but it's a start. I'll be very curious to see how it handles multiple hands or if it can detect faces or other body parts.

Every Sci-Fi fan out there is probably going nuts for this hardware, but remember it's still new and will likely have a few bugs. We'll also see how far it gets in a patent war with Microsoft, Apple or even Google. I would hope instead of war, just do a hostile take over by one of those companies.