Today is the opening of the newest piece created in collaboration with Luc Courchesne, as part of the Posture Platform project. The installation is a commission for the BMO Corporate Art Collection, and will be on display in Toronto until November 2011. The piece is titled You Are Here, and provides visitors with an immersive exploration environment of downtown Toronto. A 360 degree projection system (Panoscope) is used in conjunction with an iPhone, allowing users to fly around, watch immersive videos, and discover alternate spaces / realities. Visit the project website by clicking the image below:

You Are Here (Installation, Toronto 2011)

I’ve started to work on a project called New Terrain of Apparition (NTA) with Luc Courchesne. The goal is to connect several hemispheric projection environments (called Panoscopes), so that users can meet and interact in a networked virtual environment. Several cameras are used to capture each user from various angles, allowing an accurate image to be displayed for each relative viewing angle in the virtual world. This means that even in an immersive 360 degree display, users can look each other in eyes and have a real time video chat. Audio and video transmission is handled by Scenic, and management of the virtual environment is handled by the SPIN Framework.

Below is a video of the first prototype, which will be exhibited as part of CODE Live 1 at the Vancouver Olympics:

The NTA platform for immersive telepresence

Ménagerie Imaginaire is a musical piece that takes place in a shared virtual environment. However, this piece is rarely performed in the same fashion, since musical material is arranged throughout space and can be visited in a random and nonlinear manner. We typically perform this piece using real instruments & performers on stage, with avatar representations modelled in a virtual 3D world. The audience sees a rendered visualization of that world on screen and hears all sounds spatialized on a multi-channel audio system. The performers navigate through the scene and interact with spatially localized audio processing. Microphones capture sound from their instruments, and sensors are used to control the direction of audio propagation.

The piece was performed at the conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), in New York ( June 2007) and at the Pure Data Convention in Montreal (August 2007). Unfortunately, there were no quality recordings of these events, so we reproduced the performance and filmed it for the video that you can find below.

For more information about this piece, see the Ménagerie Imaginaire page on Audioscape.org.

A reconstruction of the piece, filmed at La Société des Arts Technologiques (Sept 2007)
Rendered for 5.1 channel surround audio. Please inquire for a DVD copy.

An early prototype (Jan, 2007)

4Dmix³ is an immersive multi-user remixing installation, that uses a ceiling-mounted camera to track many participants moving within a gallery space. The users can see their avatar representations in a mirror-like display, allowing them to localize themselves within a field of virtual sound sources. In fact, a plethora of musical loops are scattered throughout the environment, each of which are phase-locked to match the rhythms of the others.

In the end, the user experiences immersion in a virtual world, where movements guide virtual microphones through a forest of audiovisual sculptures. The sculptures emit sound that feed the users’ mix as he or she travels through through the musical landscape.

See the video below for an idea of how this works, or visit the 4Dmix³ on Audioscape.org.