The Funhouse is back and about to open June 1st

LIVEVIDEOART is proud to be a big part of The Funhouse Toronto brought to you by Mondo Forma inc. The whole team involved is working overtime and really excited for our upcoming launch Saturday June 1st.
The Funhouse is a walk through exploration exhibit of otherworldly fully immersive art installations and a trip into another dimension that showcases many Toronto artists’ creativity and use of new media technology.

In partnership with Universal music Canada , we are featuring musicians from the label as inspiration to the art rooms, creating visions of the individual artists’ music in tangible form, a feast for the eyes that is drawn from the musicians’ styles.

Spanning the full 3 floors of a custom renovated venue and event space-turned-underwater psychedelic ballroom, that we augmented with a fully immersive smart digital projection environment.
In 2018 we were brought in to add projection mapping illusions to some of the scenes within this massive ARTstravaganza.
After a year of delays beyond our control the project is back for 2019 and all set to open on June 1st. We are really happy we stuck with it and have to send a huge thanks to Mondo Forma inc for making it work out. Mondo Forma is a group of young and creative Toronto entrepreneurs who may be best known for the previous project The House of VR on Queen St. in Toronto. I first met with the team when I took part in a HOVR special event for Nuit Blanche 2017 and we foreshadowed a future of collaborating on something bigger . Well this is the something bigger and with the new location + all the amazing work that gone in  from a huge group of co-creators we are set to launch something even more incredible than I had dreamed and it’s all about the art made for Toronto by Toronto.

As Digital Media Co Lead I am designing and installing the projection mapping systems and animated content. Collaborating with LED lighting lead Nathan Wilford  and Aaron an old friend from Solstice Festival days as electrician in lighting the space and integrating projections and creative vfx over some amazing set pieces built by the production build team Manual Arts and the massive art/design team.

Rigging and testing projectors

We are deploying multiple projection and smart lighting systems to enhance the spaces created in collaborations with a deeply talented group of set designers and artists of different styles and mediums all guided by the high level design vision of the department heads and leaders like Creative Director Steph Payne and Lead ballroom prop maker Leigh Van Maaren. @binaryrainbow . You should take a minute and see all the artists involved on The Funhouse website here ..

Instead of simply creating a seamless projection scene, we pushed our media server and real time control technology to the next level, delivering something brand new and especially mind-bending.
Designed to work with our media servers and created by our sister company, dev team Wack Monster, founded by David Boon and Scott Guy. We are excited to be  premiering refleXion augmented reality 3d projection mapping tools . With our game engine based projection mapping tools we can create living scenes filled with objects, effects and creatures that react to real world inputs and deliver a smart and exploratory visual experience. Big kudos to David for all his crafty coding and  engineering as we have been designing / prototyping the refleXion suite of tools and have developed some interesting ways to interact with live real time visuals. For The Funhouse realtime 3D underwater world we built an array of simple PIR sensors that collect movement data from the entire room.

reflexion sensors . custom made PCB with 3D printed cases .
Projection mapping realtime 3D worlds with refleXion and the power of Resolume Arena projection mapping tools

I will follow up with some more posts about the refleXion system being used at The Funhouse underwater ballroom as I finish the installation and run it over the summer. Additional posts will feature the work collaborating with Casey Watson / Jazz Cartier Ben Johnson and other artists in the Funhouse art maze preceding the ballroom.

 

LIVEVIDEOART is providing the latest LVA360 media server to power the main Underwater Ballroom space. This will drive synchronised visuals to 7 video projectors and also control the room lighting , sound and be automated by a programmed schedule and collection of presets and live crowd scale motion sensor inputs.

We are using a variety of projectors to achieve the illusions and they are all being provided by our amazing tech hardware sponsor Big Digital Corp.  LVA has worked with Big Digital regularly over the last 2 years as their projection mapping technologist while they have been delivering top tech solutions around Toronto and Canada like the Genesis Experience at Pearson Airport or projection mapping City Hall for the Drake Scorpion album launch. I thank them on behalf of everyone at The Funhouse for setting us up with a great set of installation-class projectors and other hardware.

It is a privilege to be part of something like this and I cant wait to see it come alive for you all to experience. Adding projections into such a detailed set is a huge responsibility so I am pleased to say I think we nailed it and had a great time collaborating with the rest of the team .

Watch the @livevideoart and @reflexion_visuals Instagram for lots of behind the scenes posts throughout the summer.

Tickets are on sale and available here https://www.showclix.com/event/the-funhouse-toronto

http://www.funhousetoronto.com

Scott Vj Guy – LIVEVIDEOART
The Funhouse Digital Media Co Lead

Motion and depth sensors for AR and Mixed Reality

We have been using several types of sensor and depth cameras over the years to enable advance 3d tracking of peoples positions or even full skeletons. More and more this is being integrated into live visual experiences, used to control the latest real time projected AR graphics. We are aiming to support a variety of sensors in the refleXion augmented reality projections toolkit and I thought I could list some of the most interesting systems I came across in my research.

When Microsoft first came out with the Kinect sensor it was a game changer for people wanting access to affordable and high quality motion tracking. I was excited to see this kind of tech rise and find ways to use it myself like we are doing with unity 3d and refleXion Visuals . Many in the field were sad to hear the Kinect was going off the market but I am happy to say now we have a new Kinect-DK coming and it is more designed for developers this time. It is cloud enabled for deep learning and I guess whatever you can dream upI am very excited to try it out hopefully in the next month or so. When I do I will write up a little report and post a example.

New hotness !

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/

The ZED camera by Stereo Labs is a special device that I see a lot of potential in. It has two depth cameras for 2K stereoscopic vision and Zdepth detection.

Also built into the camera body is a set of motion and gyro sensors that can detect positional and orientation movements for the on board SLAM (Similtanious Localization And Mapping). ZED can act as the eyes and positional brain for and autonomous navigating robot.  With a range of up to 20 Meters I am very interested in using the ZED camera in our refleXion toolkit for full room depth and motion tracking. There is the regular and the ZED mini that is intended for a VR head mount display upgrade so you can do pass through AR and depth tracking

For developers and researchers looking for a small light weight low er cost solution for machine vision sensor  Tera Bee has some interesting products I could see being very useful in full room AR installations . The Active IR time of flight depth sensors and mini Lidar are meant for high speed depth detection and can be used in scenarios where privacy is protected and vision cameras are not acceptable.

The one system I know I want but can’t afford unless we get a big BIG project is Black Trax from Cast software . Black Trax is a ultra high end solution for detailed positional tracking. It uses a proprietary beacon system and TOF IR cameras to locate up to 80 different objects precise  movement and orientation. with this you can do things like have auto tracking spotlights on performers and projection mapping on moving objects.  Black Trax is a full system of hardware components and PC server to calibrate and stream the data. The positional data can be sent to any number of inputs like a media server or game engine.

Best regards to anyone who I met this week at FITC , Thank you Shawn and the organizers it was a lot of fun and there were really good presentations and demos throughout . Shout out to Beeple for 12 years of every days . I don’t know how you do it . Good guy, gave me a few moments to talk shop. More about that later.