Imaginary Spaces plays within the avant-garde of visualization and Human Computing Technologies. New systems for visualization computing environments transform our daily experience.
Parallel realities are continually emerging, such as Virtual, Extended, Spatial, and Augmented Realities. Developments in sensing technologies such as brain-computer interfaces and bio-data incorporate more than gestures and spatialization of human data. They bring our emotions into immediate contact with computation.
How will these new intersections with our “real” reality shape daily interactions with other humans and avatars? Identity, privilege, gestures, location, and protocols come under question in these new intersectional imaginary spaces. How do new gaming technologies influence these spaces and affordances?
The interesting questions for this domain lie in the intersections, not the capabilities or ‘slay’ immersive factors afforded by the latest tech offering, or how much better one system is than another, but rather how they influence our imagination of data as a space for human interaction, communication and understanding.
Key Research Topics:
Our past work highlights our ongoing concern in this domain. Deep Space 8K was developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab as a unique research platform for exploring coimmersive spaces for large audience groups. Tangible Link, on the other hand, explores gestures and haptics and their influence on the creation of intuitive meaning for the exhibition audience. Also, with developments such as Spaxels and SwarmOS, we have freed artificial collectives from the spatial constraints of the static pixel through swarm-based movement.
Highlights
Developed by the Futurelab, Deep Space 8K is one of the world’s most exciting digital experience spaces with 33 million pixels, stereoscopic 3D and a high-performance tracking system.
The invention of drone shows and swarm art performances: Futurelab premiered the world’s first large-scale outdoor formation drone flight and has expanded the concept continuously since then.
Powerful operating system to control large-scale swarms of UAVs (flying drones) as well as UGVs (drones that drive on the ground), invented and constantly expanded by the Ars Electronica Futurelab.
Ars Electronica Futurelab’s video production system is able to merge virtual into physical reality in real-time and to transmit this hybrid reality instantly.
Interactive 3D visualization for a concert performance of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.
FH Hagenberg students working together with the Ars Electronica Futurelab on semester projects in which they creatively explore their approaches to interactive and generative arts.
Interactive visitor guidance system that incorporates a stream of global data as a statement to set up a dialog between nature and culture — that is, human beings and architecture.
Work that proposes a form of “newspaper of the future,” exemplified by exploring the global impacts of the Russian war on Ukraine in Deep Space 8K.
Sequence of interactive stations for the Vienna Museum of Science and Technology that examine future-oriented visions of work and production, with an individually designed virtual robot as an example.
