The Accountant

David Gochfeld

Every new medium provides its own challenges and opportunities for humor. How can humor and comedy work in immersive experiences, and how can the unique attributes of VR be used to make comedy? The Accountant is a 360º video that explores aspects of comedy in VR.

https://littlstar.com/videos/782bde3f

Description

Every new medium provides its own challenges and opportunities for humor. Virtual Reality is an easy target for jokes, but can it be used to to create laughs that aren't self-referential? Without a frame it's difficult to perform comic reveals, manage timing, or direct focus. A sense of immersion and presence seems opposed to the distance often needed for laughter. But perhaps the freedom to explore a scene at your own pace, and the potential for immersion and even interaction, afford other comedic possibilities. I examine a few different ingredients of comedy and how they work in VR, and offer two pieces as possible templates: a multi-player room-scale pie fight and a short comic narrative sketch in 360º video that puts the viewer in the middle of a Mob shakedown as it goes off the rails.

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Unfolding Prejudice

Danara Sarioglu

"Unfolding Prejudice" is a series of evolving portraits that are the accumulation of faces captured by security cameras. The portraits reflect the process of instantaneous and shifting prejudice across time and location.

http://unfolding-prejudice.danaras.com

Description

“Unfolding Prejudice” is a reflection of our instantaneous accumulation of judgments depending on the diversity of faces we see in an environment. It is inspired from my experience of prejudice as the only asian looking person in my environment while I was growing up in Turkey. It uses IP camera to observe its surroundings and computer vision tools to detect and collect 'faces'. When the machine detects a face, the IP camera zooms into that area, captures the face and instantly blends the image into the evolving portrait. It is an interpretation of prejudice as humans' cognitive process using technology as an inspecting and illustrating tool. “Unfolding Prejudice” creates an ever expanding depiction of eternally evolving IDEA of a face which conveys and triggers our rapid judgments.

Classes

Thesis, Computer Vision with C++ and openFrameworks

Scanalogue

Andrew LeVine

Scanalogue is an iOS software and hardware kit designed allow photographers and analogue film enthusiasts to easily digitize and share their film negatives.

http://scanalogue.com

Description

Using a specially designed light table in combination with special optics to maximize recorded resolution Scanalogue provides users with a simple way to record negatives using camera software created specifically for the iPhone 6 in conjunction with a physical device. Through optical enhancement inside the device users are able to maximize the resolution of smaller 35mm negatives during the digitization process. End results can either be outputted in a negative TIFF file allowing the users to do post processing in a photo editing program of their choice choice. Alternately the software allows for live negative 'developing' and the output of a processed jpeg image to be used instantly for social sharing and printing.

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Thesis