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T_Visionarium
(page 4 of 6) |
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T_Visionarium
II
T_Visionarium II is an interactive immersive virtual environment
that allows viewers to spatially navigate a televisual database and
apply a recombinatory search matrix to create emergent narratives
from the database’s network of digital streams. T_Visionarium
II was premiered at Scientia, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, 2006.
T_Visionarium II exploits the latest advances in automated
video analysis, multi-media search and retrieval and high-volume video
streaming. T_Visionarium II is the first application to
put into operation iCinema’s Advanced Visualization
and Interaction Environment (AVIE), the world’s first stereoscopic
panoramic projection system. AVIE is a benchmark immersive spatial
data management installation that allows the viewer to navigate within
a 360 degree surrounding and virtually infinite three dimensional
space of audiovisual information.
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T_Visionarium II simulation |
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T_Visionarium II 's database of digital television broadcasts
contains over thirty hours of material recorded from fifty-six different
programs aired on the five Australian channels. As in T_Visionarium
I, a single uninterrupted camera take - referred to here as a
'shot' or 'clip' - defines the indivisible unit of the database. The
recorded material is automatically segmented using a cut detection
algorithm to automatically detect camera cuts and fades. The result
is a database of exactly twenty two thousand five hundred and seventy-one
shots, with an overall average length of four and a half seconds per
shot. Following segmentation, manual and automated analyses of the
database has been undertaken. The automated analysis involves the
application to each clip of state-of-the-art image and video feature
extraction algorithms, which extract edge, colour, shape, texture
and motion information. In parallel, each shot is tagged according
to a special set of semantic and associative criteria derived from
the innate qualities of the video data. These criteria are designed
to embody the most useful framework for spontaneous linking of the
segmented shots into new and unexpected relationships. A shot metric
- an algorithm for measuring similarity between shots according to
the extracted numerical features and manually applied semantic tags
- has been developed with two important features; speed and parametric
dimensional scaling. This allows almost instantaneous ranking and
sorting of the entire database according to similarity with a clip,
a necessity for real-time navigation of the database. The latter quality,
parametric dimensional scaling, allows the viewer to interactively
adjust the importance of the different dimensions when measuring similarity.
So rather than the keyword based recombination used in T_Visionarium
I, the method used in T_Visionarium II is associative,
allowing for reorganisation of the database on affective terms in
a cumulative manner.
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T_Visionarium II simulation |
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Within AVIE the viewer is able to see hundreds of the clips distributed
in three dimensions over the surface of AVIE's thirty meter long and
three and a half meter high screen. A custom developed wireless tracking
system allows the viewer to identify any one of the clips, whereupon
the display system automatically clusters other video clips around
it that have similar associative features as defined by the tagging
strategy. Clips displayed at an increasing distance from the cluster
exhibit fewer and fewer associative similarities to the viewer's choice.
In this way the viewer is free to navigate within the cluster of similarities
and so assemble a unique sequence of video events that share certain
identities, while at the same time triggering the rearrangement of
that cluster as soon as they move to a different clip. Moving their
attention to other clips at a greater distance generates completely
new recombinations. The result is a completely dynamic system of narrative
modules that are being continuously fine tuned and/or re-tuned as
the viewer navigates the data space. In this process there is a continuous
narrative reformulation that is, on the one hand, determined by the
ordering of the tagging architecture, and on the other hand, completely
free to reassemble in totally unexpected emergent sequences according
to the individual paths of exploration that the viewers undertake.
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