The Long Bar
A mixed reality media installation using vision/sensor fusion for viewer interaction with virtual characters
The Long Bar is a mixed reality interactive art installation set at the famous Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel. The installation uses AR and MXR technologies to develop historical, culturally significant events into a mulitmodal immersive interactive experience. Participants wear a head mounted display system and witness virtual characters of various notable figures, including Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, and Jean Harlow, immersed within a real world environment that is modeled on the Raffles Hotel Long Bar they once frequented. This system allows the user to experience pseudo-historical events impressed over a present day real world environment.
Using research on visibilty and occlusion, and by embedding large mesh animated characters, this installation demonstrates the results our research as well as conceptual development of immersive multimodal interaction. The installation is a demontration of in-progress research in real-time stable marker-less tracking techniques developed in the Interaction and Entertainment Research Center. This work prefigures new entertainment forms we refer to as location-based entertainment.
In this new form, narratives, animation, film based presentations are crafted to occur in real world locations. The form is interactive and audience participative and moves away from the current passive entertainment forms in film, television, theatre and performance and place the viewer inside the fourth wall and immerses the viewer into the performance installation.
The video and images here are from the installation, “Long Bar v1.0”; exhibited in the 2008 SIGGRAPH-Asia, Synthesis- Curated Show. The installation is a demontration of in-progress research in real-time stable marker-less tracking techniques completed at the Interaction and Entertainment Research Center. This first installment placed a virtual characterization of the writer Somerset Maugham in proximity with the viewer in such way that allows the viewer to move around and view from multiple angles.
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