On Thursday, November 29, 2007 our guest speaker named Simon Conlin came for the final guest lecture for the course Multimedia Pioneering at
Simon Conlin is the co-founder of Flash In The Can, also known as FITC. FITC (www.fitc.ca) is a Canadian company that produces engaging design and technology events that inspire, educate and challenge the best new media designers and developers from around the globe. Simon is also a consultant for the technologies related to gesture interactivity.
Simon originally has a music background, but few years ago he developed a taste in multimedia and now he is a pioneer for today’s and future’s interactive/new media technology. Simon had an accent and I guessed it was British and yes he moved to
In the beginning Simon directed us to a website called www.webcamtastic.com where the users could take pictures using their webcams and deform the pictures in different forms to create abstracts.
Simon had a list of YouTube links to share; I have included the links of the ones I liked at the end of this entry. Right after the introduction he played a video by Zach Booth Simpson, an installation artist who has a biology background. He connects science with interactivity and creates interactive art using projectors, cameras, and shadow detection algorithms under the name Mine-Control.
Simon gave us tips, how we can combine our learning form the Interactive Multimedia course with our past background and future interest or knowledge. I think he was some how relating to Zach Booth Simpson, biologist turned artist and himself as well, musician turned multimedia pioneer.
Next, Simon showed us a video of the interactive stage setup for George Michael’s concert with real-time audio analysis and position tracking by a German design team called Meso. In layman terms I would say it’s like the media player’s visualizations, but at the same time it’s a lot different than just a visualization. I’m impressed how technology is dramatically changing the way things are or thing were. Wow! Make the floors and walls come alive.
At last Simon showed us a multi touch interactive wall where the user could play with musical instruments with the motion capture of their hands. It reminded me of the GestureTek’s trip where we saw a similar kind of interactivity and/or game.
I liked the video where Zach Booth Simpson talked about art and interactivity.
It was a brief and quick lecture and was more of YouTube videos than the actual speaker speaking. At last Simon ended up forwarding his list of YouTube links so that we could explore more on our own.
Related Links:
http://www.mine-control.com/
http://naturalinteraction.org/
http://www.meso.net/
http://www.adamchapmanart.com/
Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuCvGeVcxlo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plNDHfzTBn0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul1CX_PkfaI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9kIHlC-8Yg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NRdyUx8Lc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKehq6qsdY
