Long Bar
A mixed reality media installation using vision/sensor fusion for viewer interaction with virtual characters


tiger2


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. Through the application of research in occlusion, and by embedding large mesh animated characters, this installation demonstrates the results of the technical research and the conceptual development of immersive multimodal interaction.



The installation is a demontration of in-progress research in real-time stable marker-less tracking techniques currently underway in the Interaction and Entertainment Research Center. This first installation places virtual tigers in proximity with the viewer in such way that allows the viewer to move around and view from multiple angles and use hand and voice signal to coax responses form the virtual animals.

This work prefigures new entertainment forms we refer to as location-based entertainment. In this new form, narratives, animation, film based presentation 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.


headset

The sample images here are from the second installation, “Long Bar v1.0" shown in the Synthesis- Curated Show. SIGGRAPH-Asia. December 2008. The installation is a demontration of in-progress research in real-time stable marker-less tracking techniques currently underway in the Interaction and Entertainment Research Center. This first installment places 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.


2009 Pensyl, W.(Russell)., Tran, C.T.Q., Hsin, P.F. and Lee, S.P. Location Based Entertainment and Co-Evolutionary Narratives in Mixed Reality Immersive Environments, In Proc. of the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA) 2009. Ulster, Northern Ireland

1. Kato, H., & Billinghurst, M. 1999. Marker tracking and HMD calibration for a video-based augmented reality conferencing system. Paper presented at the 2nd IEEE and ACM
International Workshop on Augmented Reality,
1999. (IWAR ‘99), San Francisco, CA.

2. De Landa, Manuel. 1991. War in the Age of
Intelligent Machines. New York: Swerve Editions. — 1998 "Virtual Environ-ments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason." Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post- Human Pragmatism. Eds. Joan Dixon and Eric Cassidy. London: Routledge.

3. Weibel, Peter. 2002 "Narrated Theory: Multi-ple projection and Multiple Narration." in Eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. London: BFI and ZKM.

4. Beneli, Iris Selective Attention and Arousal,
California State University, Northridge
http://www.csun.edu/
~vcpsy00h/students/
arousal.htm

5. Sandra M. Messinger; Pleasure and
Complexity: Berlyne Revisited, Journal of
Psychology, Vol. 132, 1998 New York University