| Digital Radiance, working
with noted national design firms Edwin
Schlossberg, Inc., Redmon Group
and Design and Production, designed
and developed the interactive 3D video-wall software for the
state-of-the-art Currents of Creativity permanent exhibit at the
new John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. Located in the
museum's remarkable Gallery of Imagination, the interactive exhibit
features six "creation stations" facing a 24-foot-wide x
10-foot-high video-wall. At the creation stations, museum visitors are
invited to create a personal collage from a collection of hundreds of religious
images.
Upon completion, the collage is scrolled off the top of the creation
station's screen and simultaneously scrolled on to the bottom of the
video-wall in front of the creation station. The visitor's collage
then gently drifts and rises across the video-wall with other
visitor-created collages, accompanied by a real-time mix of music,
sound-effects and background artwork and text.
Unique to this exhibit is the real-time nature of the video-wall's
content, all controlled by Digital Radiance's custom 3D software. Unlike
video-wall exhibits that display pre-rendered animation or
video, this 2560 x 1024-pixel exhibit features real-time path-based animation of up to
thirteen onscreen 24-bit images ranging in size from 512 x 512 pixels to as large
as 1024 x 1024 pixels. All of the drifting images can have
simultaneous effects applied such as 3D rotation, image translucency,
fading, blurring, and multi-frame movie-loops. The custom software,
written in Visual C++ and OpenGL, runs on a Windows 2000-based system with a
single, dual-pipeline 3Dlabs
Wildcat 4210 graphics card.
Digital Radiance also created a scripting language for the
software, allowing the exhibit's creative artists to easily shape the
final look and feel. The software communicates asynchronously via
the exhibit's LAN with the six creation stations and the audio
applications, providing a seamless, real-time, fault-tolerant distributed
system running for thousands of visitors every day.
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Photo courtesy of Design and Production, Inc.
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