Collaborative Tools Project

Sara Perry taught the Archaeology module to design an exhibition for the 3Sixty space at York. This year the students really went beyond all expectations and produced some stunning and innovative work that made full use of the space's abilities. One piece, about Clifford's Tower, made use of numerous live action actors to deliver snippets of spoken word from the time. The presentation had moments where spotlights illuminated the actors in the room ( see below ). When this piece put you in a 3D model of Clifford's Tower, slowly flying around it, it was actually breathtaking. What is shown here is only a facsimile of the real experience ( of course the actors aren't acting for us in it ) but it does give you some idea of how well the piece was choreographed and how professionally the students wove their ideas into a compelling experience. I was involved in helping to take their work and make it viewable using a Javascript 3D library called Three.js . ...

In a recent student project to create archaeological exhibitions in the 3Sixty space we needed to look at how to easily chop a very wide movie into four separate smaller movies. There are lots of templates to help you present in the 3Sixty space, including Powerpoint files  but we also needed a way to view the presentations NOT in the space itself which would require some form of 3D version of a 2D presentation shown in real 3D. Are you keeping up? We needed a version of the presentation that could be viewed on screen rather than in the room. I found a python library that would let you edit videos using code called MoviePy . It's brilliant! You can do video-in-video effects, split panel videos, animations, freeze frames and all sorts. So, with the code below, we were able to take a VERY WIDE movie generated by the Powerpoint template being exported as a movie... and make four separate movie files, one for each wall. from moviepy.editor import * from moviepy.video.fx....

So after a lot of experimentation, I decided that WebGL was a good way to go ( see an earlier post  about automatically showing videos on a 3D models walls). I took the video example and simply hacked around, watching where objects move to when I changed values, and then added extra objects, in this case walls. And it worked! Which is pretty impressive ( I think ) for someone who knows nothing about 3D programming. Here is a live version showing music I loved from the 70s .

A thinking out loud post ... The Scenario At the university we have an amazing room called the 3Sixty . It's a room that can have media projected onto all four walls (and there's some amazing speakers in there too ).  Sara Perry runs a module in there for archaeology students to design a museum exhibition. Last year the students created World War I exhibitions using Powerpoint and YouTube videos. They were very moving. I almost cried at one about a loyal Alsatian. The Problem The problem is this... The students use a very wide ( four walls ) Powerpoint template to create their 3Sixty presentation, but once made, the only place you can really experience this presentation is in the room itself. It would be good if these .ppt files ( or exported movies ) could be projected onto a 3D version of the room. It's a very simple render, I think, but would allow people to see the presentations without being in the room. Having no experience of 3D modelling, I dived in and h...