Creative Tech Week 2017

At Looking Glass, we're chasing the cinema dream of the hologram. This is a call for all artists, makers, coders, Star Wars lovers, and nerds of the world to come by for *Playtest Party: Hologram Hour* at our beloved lab space in Greenpoint. We've made a discovery or two these past few months and want to share them with you over a drink. Or two. Or 3, 4, 5! This will be a prototype-laden shindig where we share some new wonders (along with failed experiments) reaching towards the dream of the hologram THE FUTURE AWAITS!

What is Techonomy NYC?

Techonomy NYC is a full day, highly collaborative, event where leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs will gather to explore the impact technology has on business and society. Techonomy NYC is not a tech conference, rather a conference about how tech is changing everything else. They have curated an amazing group of speakers and topics that will address how tech permeates every aspect of our lives. Attendees are guaranteed to leave energized, motivated, and inspired.

Techonomy NYC is a New York version of Techonomy's longstanding retreat in California, where last fall Mark Zuckerberg famously first spoke about fake news. Igniting invigorating discourse around topics that include ongoing challenges relating to what a government led by Trump means for technology; the future of work in an on-demand gig economy; the digital and social fight against terrorism; and tough-to-answer questions about decision making power in an Artificially Intelligent world, Techonomy NYC is one day you will not want to miss.

Creative Tech Week members receive a 50% savings by using code CTW at checkout. 

Register today!

Learn all about some of the easy to use APIs offered by Microsoft to integrate into your own projects with some fun and interactive demos featuring web applications and twitter bots. Figure out which cat fits your mood based off our Emotion API & get a cute selfie makeover from a twitter bot featuring our Face API.  

The Vacation Simulator is a roomscale VR experience that ties together recreated vacation spots through an open experience for users to travel to without hopping a plane. It recreates spectacular vacation spots using advanced volumetric capture workflows involving photogrammetry, LIDAR scanning, and gigapan spherical HDRIs. The captures are set throughout the background, middleground, and foreground to narrate a volumetric space.

Credits:

Leigh Christie, Isobar Nowlab Americas Manager

Mike DiGiovanni, Mobile Architect

Damien Girardi, Creative Director

Robert Goeldner, Associate Creative Director

Julie Huynh, Unity Developer

Anthony Kolb, Lead Motion Designer

Nitya Noronha, Senior Experience Designer

Kari Raimondi, Project Manager

Michael Tomczak, Lead Producer

 In this workshop participants will learn about the process of creating a VR game with Unity and the Oculus Rift. We will utilize a mix of technologies including 3D Scanning, Cloud based rigging and animation software, a game engine, and a VR head mounted display. We will create a 3D geometric modeled avatar of participants using 3D Scanning. The avatars will then be ‘rigged’ with a skeleton to be able to be animated with motion capture data. These assets will be put into a game engine to be able to allow control and interact with the avatars. The end result will be a VR interactive game experience where a the character is a 3D model generated Avatar of YOU!

Participants can also view a demonstration of game motions applied from motion capture as demonstrated via a remote connection to NYIT's Motion Capture lab in Long Island, NY.


Sat, May 20, 12:15-1:15pm
Sponsored by the HIVE
Location: New York Institute of Technology, 16 West 61st St., 9th floor, room 924
Free to CTW conference attendees
Space is limited to the first 15 RSVP’s.
Lunch will be provided.

REGISTER HERE!! 

As a compliment to two scheduled interactive sound walks featuring new works for U-GRUVE AR, the Audio Augmented Reality app created by Mr. Rodkin, the talk will focus on what U-GRUVE AR is, how it works, and who some of the composers are that have been creating pieces for the app, In addition to a brief walkthrough/virtual demo in the Unity 3D environment, a working demo has been created which participants can experience right outside the conference venue.

http://u-gruve.com

Virtual reality can trick your brain into believing you're somewhere real. This power is called Presence, and it revolutionizes psychological research. Human cognition is hard to study in the lab. You can't expect someone to act naturally in a copper-shielded room with their scalp covered by electrodes, and remembering lists of words on a computer screen is has little to do with everyday life. VR lets us, for the first time, study human behavior in a way that generalizes to the real world.

A research experiment (published here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3027390) sought to uncover the neural signature of memory and found some surprising results. Participants completed a memory game in VR and on a flat computer screen while wearing an EEG brain sensing headband. Machine learning techniques were able to successfully predict memory based on brain activity, but only in VR. A follow-up study will chase down this mysterious interaction by adding physiological signals (eye tracking, heart rate, breathing rate, etc.) and using machine learning to enhance memory in real-time.

Why does brain activity predict memory better in VR than on a flat screen? What goes on in our brains when we believe we're somewhere else? Is there a neural signature of presence? It wouldn't be science if we already knew the answers.

Lightning talk: Julie Huynh
A talk about volumetric capture techniques and toolkits for virtual reality. An overview of creating other content disseminations from a full room-scale VR application to 360 video and mixed reality trailers.