Urban Visuals » responsive

VIFC- Blog driven digital sign

konstantinos — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:10:26 +0000

In late 2007 we were commissioned by the Vancouver International Film Centre to create a graphic presentation system for a large outdoor screen at the front of the theatre facing a busy urban street. The primary function of the sign was to display current and upcoming film screenings and to generally draw attention to the theatre from the high volume of passers by. There were distinct limitations on content creation and management that conventional ‘pre-production’ of daily/weekly animations would not suffice. There was neither the time nor the budget to create motion graphics for the screen on a weekly basis, the management side alone would have been crippling to production. One of our programmers, Manjit, had been working with a ‘generative’ graphics application developed by Apple. Manjit proposed we use this application to generate the graphics in real-time. After several weeks working with Nathan, Urban’s technical director, they pulled together a system that used a blog to generate tasteful real-time graphics for the sign.
[MEDIA=1]
The motion design was based upon several factors, a look that would work with the aesthetic of the building itself, and more importantly, a timing based upon the 30 sec. ‘viewing window’ of most passers by.

Circlesquare Live – MIDI driven stage-show

konstantinos — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:22:11 +0000

Urban visuals has developed a stage show for the circlesquare live shows that is run by the music being played live. Both the visuals and the lighting are triggered by the music, a midi note sent by the drummer will trigger a specific video to play which in turn controls the colour and animation of the stage lighting. This live show has been performed and several notable festivals including Sonar 2005 and Mutek Mexico 2007.

Bespoke lighting control

konstantinos — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:23:12 +0000

For each of our installations we create a custom control interface for the venue. This allows for a more user friendly and site specific approach, something that is created specifically for the people that use the system. With this approach the possibilities with respect to what the interface can be are endless. Sometimes are more raw literal interface is more practical, where the light patterns, colour and animation are clearly shown (above left) or an interface that refers to the physical design elements where the lights are imbedded (above right).

Light embedded bar top

konstantinos — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:24:34 +0000

For the Shine Nightclub redesign we created an animated bar top that appears to be filled with flickering candles. This application was especially challenging as we had to control 200 lights able to display 16 million different colours in an infinite amount of patterns. In its completed form the glowing wood bar-top can display a multitude of different animations that give it an surreal appearance that is hard to describe so please watch the clip.

light_embedded_bar_clip

Animated Wall Panels

konstantinos — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:04:43 +0000

For the Century house re-design we worked with the interior designers to integrate LED lighting into portions of the interior. Our favorite part was the creation ‘animated fabric’ wall panels, where we brought the panels to life by illumination and animation. The result was a wall of animated dots that would randomly appear within the pattern of the fabric, the animated dots can appear in any colour and respond to sound or user input via a touch screen across the room.

Interiors with integrated lighting design

konstantinos — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:23:04 +0000

In our recent projects we have ventured for a fusion between digital media and the physical features of a space to give it a changeable atmosphere. We believe that buildings and spaces can express a mood, a tone and an energy level. This we see as the initial layer in creating expressive and informative interiors and facades. Collaboration with Architects and interior designers is essential to our goals, this is how our own design process comes to life.

The ubiquitous nature of LED lighting & digital media have made it as malleable as mortar to the building process, in a sense it is on the way to becoming another building technology.

There are many ways to use light and materials, the latest generation of LED’s allow designers
to have lighting where it was not practical or possible before. Above is a typical light/ materials brief (in this case) showing how light can interact with Lucite.