With the holidays just around the corner, the shopping season is in full swing. But finding gifts for art teachers or other creative individuals can be tricky! After all, there’s not much they can’t make for themselves.
Of course, it’s truly the thought that matters. But, if your family and friends are looking for ideas (or if you’re looking for a way to treat yourself!), you might want to check out the great list below!
WayRay makes augmented reality hardware and software for cars and drivers.
The company won a start-up competition at the Los Angeles Auto Show.
WayRay has also received an investment from Alibaba.
WayRay’s augmented reality driving system makes a car’s windshield look like a video game. The Swiss-based company that makes augmented reality for cars won the grand prize in a start-up competition at the Los Angeles Auto Show on Tuesday. WayRay makes a small device called Navion, which projects a virtual dashboard onto a driver’s windshield. The software can display information on speed, time of day, or even arrows and other graphics that can help the driver navigate, avoid hazards, and warn of dangers ahead, such as pedestrians. WayRay says that by displaying information directly on the windshield, the system allows drivers to stay better focused on the road. The display might appear similar to what a player would see on a screen in many video games. But the system also notifies the driver of potential points of interest along a route such as restaurants or other businesses.
Virtual reality is arguably a good medium for art: it not only enables creativity that just isn’t possible if you stick to physical objects, it allows you to share pieces that would be difficult to appreciate staring at an ordinary computer screen. And HTC knows it. The company is launching Vive Arts, a “multi-million dollar” program that helps museums and other institutions fund, develop and share art in VR. And yes, this means apps you can use at home… including one that’s right around the corner.
There are no room-scale sensors or controllers, because The Ochre Atelier, as the experience is called, is designed to be accessible to everyone regardless of computing expertise. And at roughly 6-7 minutes long, it’s also bite-size enough that hopefully every visitor to the exhibition can take a turn. Its length and complexity don’t make it any less immersive though. The experience itself is, superficially, a tour of Modigliani’s last studio space in Paris: a small, thin rectangular room a few floors above street level.
In all, it took five months to digitally re-create the space. A wealth of research went into The Ochre Atelier, from 3D mapping the actual room — the building is now a bed-and-breakfast — to looking at pictures and combing through first-person accounts of Modigliani’s friends and colleagues at the time. The developers at Preloaded took all this and built a historically accurate re-creation of what the studio would’ve looked like. You teleport around this space a few times, seeing it from different angles and getting more insight into the artist at each stop. Look at a few obvious “more info” icons from each perspective and you’ll hear narrated the words of those closest to Modigliani at the time, alongside some analyses from experts at the Tate.
Next-Gen Virtual Reality Will Let You Create From Scratch—Right Inside VR — from autodesk.com by Marcello Sgambelluri The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is about to undergo a radical shift in its workflow. In the near future, designers and engineers will be able to create buildings and cities, in real time, in virtual reality (VR).
Excerpt:
What’s Coming: Creation Still, these examples only scratch the surface of VR’s potential in AEC. The next big opportunity for designers and engineers will move beyond visualization to actually creating structures and products from scratch in VR. Imagine VR for Revit: What if you could put on an eye-tracking headset and, with the movement of your hands and wrists, grab a footing, scale a model, lay it out, push it, spin it, and change its shape?
Additionally, we want to challenge you (and ourselves, too) to find time to be more creative. What do you want to learn more about? What art project have you been thinking about but haven’t made time to make a reality? Make it happen this month! Stay tuned, as throughout November we’ll be sharing:
Real-life examples of Design Thinking in the classroom
How creativity and critical thinking can go hand-in-hand
How makerspaces can become a core component of your work on creativity
A cool new city-wide effort to integrate art into different subject areas from a large urban district
How you can engage your classroom with music and games
How project-based learning can unleash student creativity
How one school encouraged creativity and project-based learning through a school-wide peace prize
Virtual and Augmented Reality are poised to profoundly transform the STEM curriculum. In this article, we offer several inspiring examples and key insights on the future of immersive learning and the sciences. Immersive technologies will revolutionize learning through experiential simulations, modelling and spatial representation of data, and a sense of presence in contextual gamification.
Understanding our place in the universe, building the next Martian Rover, designing new transportation systems, fostering sustainable communities, modeling economic stability — finding the solution for these pressing and interconnected challenges brings us to STEM and STEAM in teaching and learning. The movement behind STEAM advocates incorporating the arts and humanities to the science, technology, engineering and math curriculum.
More Than Just Cool?— from insidehighered.com by Nick Roll Virtual and augmented realities make headway in courses on health care, art history and social work.
Excerpt:
When Glenn Gunhouse visits the Pantheon, you would think that the professor, who teaches art and architecture history, wouldn’t be able to keep his eyes off the Roman temple’s columns, statues or dome. But there’s something else that always catches his eye: the jaws of the tourists visiting the building, and the way they all inevitably drop.
“Wow.”
There’s only one other way that Gunhouse has been able to replicate that feeling of awe for his students short of booking expensive plane tickets to Italy. Photos, videos and even three-dimensional walk-throughs on a computer screen don’t do it: It’s when his students put on virtual reality headsets loaded with images of the Pantheon.
…nursing schools are using virtual reality or augmented reality to bring three-dimensional anatomy illustrations off of two-dimensional textbook pages.
Facebook is set to reveal a standalone Oculus virtual reality headset sometime later this year, Bloomberg reports, with a ship date of sometime in 2018. The headset will work without requiring a tethered PC or smartphone, according to the report, and will be branded with the Oculus name around the world, except in China, where it’ll carry Xiaomi trade dress and run some Xiaomi software as part of a partnership that extends to manufacturing plans for the device.
Facebook Inc. is taking another stab at turning its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset into a mass-market phenomenon. Later this year, the company plans to unveil a cheaper, wireless device that the company is betting will popularize VR the way Apple did the smartphone.
From DSC and Adobe — for faculty members and teachers out there:
Do your students an enormous favor by assigning them a digital communications project. Such a project could include images, infographics, illustrations, animations, videos, websites, blogs (with RSS feeds), podcasts, videocasts, mobile apps and more. Such outlets offer powerful means of communicating and demonstrating knowledge of a particular topic.
As Adobe mentions, when you teach your students how to create these types of media projects, you prepare them to be flexible and effective digital communicators. I would also add that these new forms and tools can be highly engaging, while at the same time, they can foster students’ creativity. Building new media literacy skills will pay off big time for your students. It will land them jobs. It will help them communicate to a global audience. Students can build upon these skills to powerfully communicate numerous kinds of messages in the future. They can be their own radio station. They can be their own TV station.
From DSC: After reviewing the article and video (below), it will be interesting to see how machine-to-machine (M2M) communications will be used in combination with augmented reality — and perhaps with virtual reality and mixed reality as well. That is, get to within a certain range of an object, and something automatically happens on your mobile device or your head mounted device. Perhaps that’s the sort of thing Apple is building into their next smart phone. It would sure open up some interesting learning and entertainment-related experiences — as such new affordances could help foster anticipation and curiosity, while grabbing someone’s attention.
This type of thing could easily become a piece of the future of art and creativity.
Even in its early beta stages, the new live exhibition from digital artists Adrien M and Claire B will have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief. Throughout their Mirages & Miracles display, the artist duo uses wondrous applications of augmented reality to create an orchestra of new installations, both small and large. Much like their live dance performance work at BAM, the new bundle merges the digital with the material, blurring the lines between what is real and what is fake. The multi-pronged ensemble uses augmented drawings, holographic illusions, virtual-reality headsets, and large-scale projections to create a number of unbelievable scenarios “that take root in both the mirage and the miracle,” according to the duo.
By hovering their smartphones over the catalog’s pages, prospective students are able to view videos of student creative sessions, play video games designed by students, take tours of residence halls, and more using the SCAD mobile app, which is available from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.
Powered byLayaraugmented reality technology, the catalog contains more than 150 digital assets, 200 micro-interactions, and 85 trackable pages, including the cover.
Summer 2017 Human++ — fromcambridge.nuvustudio.com Human-Machine Intelligence, Hacking Drones, Bio Fashion, Augmented Video Games, Aerial Filmmaking, Smart Tools, Soft Robotics and more!
Excerpt:
NuVu is a place where young students grow their spirit of innovation. They use their curiosity and creativity to explore new ideas, and make their concepts come to life through our design process. Our model is based on the architecture studio model, and every Summer we use imaginative themes to frame two-week long Studios in which students dive into hands-on design, engineering, science, technology, art and more!
Superb creative photo manipulations by Chunlong Sun — from designyoutrust.com Chunlong Sun is a talented graphic designer, art director and retoucher who lives and works in Beijing, China. Chunlong focuses on advertising, he creates stunning surreal, sci-fi and humour manipulations.
ISNS students embrace learning in a world of virtual reality — from by
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
To give students the skills needed to thrive in an ever more tech-centred world, the International School of Nanshan Shenzhen (ISNS) is one of the world’s first educational facilities now making instruction in virtual reality (VR) and related tools a key part of the curriculum.
Building on a successful pilot programme last summer in Virtual Reality, 3D art and animation, the intention is to let students in various age groups experiment with the latest emerging technologies, while at the same time unleashing their creativity, curiosity and passion for learning.
To this end, the school has set up a special VR innovation lab, conceived as a space for exploration, design and interdisciplinary collaboration involving a number of different subject teachers.
Using relevant software and materials, students learn to create high-quality digital content and to design “experiences” for VR platforms. In this “VR Lab makerspace” – a place offering the necessary tools, resources and support – they get to apply concepts and theories learned in the classroom, develop practical skills, document their progress, and share what they have learned with classmates and other members of the tech education community.
As a next logical step, she is also looking to develop contacts with a number of the commercial makerspaces which have sprung up in Shenzhen. The hope is that students will then be able to meet engineers working on cutting-edge innovations and understand the latest developments in software, manufacturing, and areas such as laser cutting, and 3D printing, and rapid prototyping.
The Lounge, enabled by Samsung on November 8, 2016 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Anna Kucera)
The Lounge, enabled by Samsung on November 8, 2016 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Anna Kucera)
Also see:
The Lounge enabled by Samsung Open day and night, The Lounge enabled by Samsung is a new place in the heart of the Opera House where people can sit and enjoy art and culture through the latest technology. The most recent in a series of future-facing projects enabled by Sydney Opera House’s Principal Partner, Samsung, the new visitor lounge features stylish, comfortable seating, as well as interactive displays and exclusive digital content, including:
The Sails – a virtual-reality experience of what it’s like to stand atop the sails of Australia’s most famous building, brought to you via Samsung Gear VR;
Digital artwork – a specially commissioned video exploration of the Opera House and its stories, produced by creative director Sam Doust. The artwork has been themed to match the time of day and is the first deployment of Samsung’s latest Smart LED Display panel technology in Australia; and
Google Cultural Institute – available to view on Samsung Galaxy View and Galaxy Tab S2 tablets, the digital collection features 50 online exhibits that tell the story of the Opera House’s past, present and future through rare archival photography, celebrated performances, early architectural drawings and other historical documents, little-known interviews and Street View imagery.
A hybrid of both AR & VR, Mixed Reality (MR) is far more advanced than Virtual Reality because it combines the use of several types of technologies including sensors, advanced optics and next gen computing power. All of this technology bundled into a single device will provide the user with the capability to overlay augmented holographic digital content into your real-time space, creating scenarios that are unbelievably realistic and mind-blowing.
How does it work?
Mixed Reality works by scanning your physical environment and creating a 3D map of your surroundings so the device will know exactly where and how to place digital content into that space – realistically – while allowing you to interact with it using gestures. Much different than Virtual Reality where the user is immersed in a totally different world, Mixed Reality experiences invite digital content into your real-time surroundings, allowing you to interact with them.
Mixed reality use cases mentioned in the article included:
From DSC: In the future, I’d like to see holograms provide stunning visual centerpieces for the entrance ways into libraries, or in our classrooms, or in our art galleries, recital halls, and more. The object(s), person(s), scene(s) could change into something else, providing a visually engaging experience that sets a tone for that space, time, and/or event.
Eventually, perhaps these types of technologies/setups will even be a way to display artwork within our homes and apartments.
