Is the virtual world becoming a reality? It would seem so.
Project ‘Anywhere’ is an intention to breach the limits of physical human presence in space, by replacing kinaesthetic, visual and auditory with artificial sensory experiences, in a fully interactive virtual environment.
We are amazed and fascinated by ‘project Anywhere’. Designed by Constantinos Miltiadis for his postgraduate thesis at ETH University, Zurich, project Anywhere transports your vision and your body to a digital world. The ‘Inteligloves’ capture hand movements and Kinect gloves track your skeleton. This combination feeds, in real time, to your computer, which in turn sends it, via the cloud to the app on your phone.
Oh yes, we failed to make mention of the appearance of a smartphone. This is housed in a mask. Thus creating a truly immersive digital experience.
Miltiadis’s concept kit recently won him the Arthur C Clarke design award from the American Museum of Science Fiction. Further cementing this piece of science fiction as more than tangible science fact!
Project Anywhere was presented at the TEDx event at the National Technical University of Athens to a fully deserving rapturous reception.
Innovations such as this is why we just love technology. There is always going to be the argument that our lives are becoming inundated by the ever-increasing advances, no surprises not from these quarters!
Reminiscent of an invention from one of the great minds of literature, indeed from the master Arthur C. Clarke, project Anywhere shows the abilities of our greatest thinkers knows no bounds.
The project’s title, “Anywhere”, refers to the generic nature of the digital and thus the virtual environment that can be produced. The digital landscape, or meeting place, can be made to simulate any physical context: real or imaginary; related or not to the subjects’ physical surroundings.
Come on!! How could you not be excited by the possibilities? The capabilities of Anywhere come alive the ‘omnitracker’ app. The software was developed as a quantisation platform of a physical human presence in space. Alongside the capabilities of unity3D and java, a local Xbox Kinect sensor and Inteliglove system provide wireless and real-time, body skeleton and hand gesture tracking with a total of 83 degrees of freedom. The resulting animation presents the user as a digital avatar. Any movement, such as a slight head tilt, a finger movement, or walking, corresponds to a correlated action in the computed universe and manipulations towards its objects.
Obviously, I am excited by this – can you tell? However, I have yet to actually experience it first hand, my juices have flowed purely by the excitement I have read about via the press and online. However, the project is something I would love to experience and one I think we should champion.
I look forward to hearing more and congratulations to Constantinos Miltiadis and his team.
Until next time…
