Wednesday, April 29, 2009

No, This Dancing Building's Bricks Are Not Falling Like Tetris

    via Gizmodo by Brian Lam on 4/24/09

    This isn't an animation, and it's not CGI and it's not a building doing the humpty dance. It's actually the old mint in downtown SF being painted by 7 perfectly mapped HD projectors.

    Obscura Digital, the company behind the light show at Youtube's Symphony last week, has has used their propriety software to control a giant HD light show spread across multiple HD projectors for a Mcafee ad. Never mind the marketing purpose, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I think of it as using 3d graphics gear to make the real world look like video games, instead of using 3d graphics gear to make games appear realistic.

    To get the image to look seamless, the software calculates distance and angle and surface shape of the building, compensating for brightness, picture shift, and other variables. This sort of thing would normally take months to plan, but they set up this example in a matter of days, due to the flexibility of the software. Here are examples of their other work, including the iGoogle launch in NYC (which used almost 20 projectors) and the youtube symphony. [Obscura via Fast Company]


No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive

Popular Posts