T_Visionarium (AKA Project TVisionarium Mk II)

This series of pages summarises the contribution I made to TVisionarium Mk II, an immersive eye-popping stereo 3D interactive 360-degree experience where a user can search through a vast database of television shows and rearrange their shots in the virtual space that surrounds them to explore intuitively their semantic similarities and differences.

It is a research project undertaken by iCinema, The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales (my former uni) directed by Professor Jeffrey Shaw and Dr Dennis Del Favero. More information about the project itself, Mk I and the infrastructure used, is available online.

I was contracted by iCinema to develop several core system components during an intense one month period before the launch in September of 2006. My responsibilities included writing the distributed MPEG-2 video streaming engine that enables efficient clustered playback of the shots, a distributed communications library, the spatial layout algorithm that positions the shots on the 360-degree screen and various other video processing utilities. The most complex component was the video engine, which I engineered from scratch to meet very demanding requirements (more details are available on the next page).

Luckily I had the pleasure of working alongside some wonderfully talented people: in particular Matt McGinity (3D graphics/VR guru), as well as Jared Berghold, Ardrian Hardjono and Tim Kreger.

My Contribution

I wrote the following major system components:

Video Behind the Scenes

1000 videos can be seen playing back simultaneously!

This is a preview video produced by iCinema:

This is an older video I made with my handycam:
(Please excuse the poor quality.)

Appearances in TV News

09/01/2007 - SBS World News:

August 2006 - Channel Nine News:

Events

T_Visionarium was officially launched on 08/01/2006 as part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. Please read my blog post about it. Here are some pictures:

The festival banner:

Crowd before the speeches:

The digital maestros (Matt McGinity & I):

 


In March 2007, I held a private exhibition for my friends (click on the image to see the photo gallery):