With Avatar, director James Cameron built the most immersive virtual world that has ever been created on-screen. Now, Snibbe Interactive brings the futuristic technology and alien ecology to life in Avatar: The Exhibition at Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum – open through September 2012. The exhibition is about as true-blue a fan can get without body paint.

Using Snibbe Interactive’s SocialScreen platform, visitors are invited to wade into Pandora’s ecology and mingle with simulated woodsprites. In the exhibit, luminescent floating jellyfish-like creatures glide through a high definition projection of the planet’s verdant forest. The glowing woodsprites descend upon visitor’s shadows when they remain still, and skitter away when visitors move suddenly, just like the magical creatures in the movie.

During the production of Avatar, director James Cameron used a “virtual camera” to move within and capture Pandora’s three-dimensional landscape. Snibbe Interactive recreated this process with a Virtual Camera exhibit in which visitors can become a director, creating their own unique version of scenes created with the identical 3-D material the production’s visual artists created for the film.

Similarly, SocialStage replicates the real-time “performance capture” of Avatar’s actors. When you step into SocialStage’s glowing room and begin to shake your blue booty, it’s not merely a Na’vi simulacrum – it’s the same 3D models in which actors Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana injected their creative energies. It’s the same digital DNA, making your Avatar and theirs digital half-siblings.

Snibbe Interactive’s multi-touch display, the SocialTable Touch, provides an intuitive interface to showcase trivia, images, video and other ephemera behind the Avatar experience. It’s like a Na’vi-sized iPad! Drop special shapes onto the table and rings of material spin out, allowing you to endlessly explore the concept art and alien ecology created to make Pandora feel so real.

The recent release of Microsoft’s Kinect* has raised the profile of our time-tested 3D tracking interfaces. To support the demand for full 3d sensing, Snibbe Interactive has now adapted all of its large SocialScreen interactive wall products to work on the LCD Display of our SocialMirror platform. To get started, just plug it into an outlet and the system auto-calibrates and runs within moments, requiring no special background behind visitors.

In an exciting development, as of the beginning of 2011, all or our systems now support the Kinect Camera in addition to the industrial depth-sensing cameras we already offer. Watch the video below to see some of our most popular immersive titles running on SocialMirror with Kinect! And, even better, you can purchase these titles immediately for museum, entertainment, and marketing applications. Our shipping systems run with time-tested industrial depth-sensing cameras, and don’t need to wait for the eventual release of Microsoft’s commercial SDK sometime later this year. Of course, we’ll be excited once this license is approved by Microsoft and we can offer the Kinect as part of our suite of cameras.

*Kinect is a trademark of Microsoft

Watch the new video below for a selection from the wide range of InfoTiles interactive walls that we’ve installed for museums, entertainment, and marketing.

1) At the Guinness Museum in LA, people discover the top records of Hollywood stars.

2) Dell used InfoTiles at a tradeshow to deliver a complex message on custom software with ease and humor.

3) The College Basketball Hall of Fame uses Infotiles to explore its history.

4) Prudential used Infotiles to colorfully highlight ways of using social media.

5) The Singapore Science Center used InfoTiles to teach about penguins.

6)  Floodgate Investments highlighted its investments in Twitter and Digg.

7) The Miami Science Museum uses an expanded version of InfoTiles that asks questions about sustainability, letting people literally vote with their feet. Many more are coming your way this year!

“Chinese audiences absolutely love the Dream Lantern interactive. Especially kids, it’s a big hit with them!” – Christian Lachel, ICP Creative Director, BRC Imagination Arts

Working with BRC Imagination Arts, Snibbe Interactive created a customized Word Wall experience for Information and Communications Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, sponsored by China Mobile and China Telecom.

The two interactive walls show colorful ICT Power™ characters flying across the screen. As visitors to the expo walk in front of the walls, the characters drop 3D animated dream lanterns. Using their shadows, people can interact with the wall to catch and collect the lanterns and release fireworks. Visitors can later retrieve a personalized video of themselves interacting with the ICT Power™ characters that can then be shared online via SocialShare. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words – the Word Wall is truly exponential.

IAAPA (The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) published their February Funworld Magazine last week with an article that prominently mentions Snibbe Interactive’s new technologies for interactive digital signage. Of most interest is the new SocialMirror platform that uses LCD screens and a three-dimensional depth-sensing camera to measure people’s full-body movements without any special background; the platform also precisely tracks the number of impressions and dwell-time of people in the experiences. The article also discusses the SocialShare platform’s ability to share personalized experiences created in digital signage applications online in Facebook and other social networks. SocialNet allows hundreds or even thousands of SocialMirrors to be connected into an interactive digital signage network for stores, franchise, or advertising networks. These new technologies show great promise for high-traffic, low-space environments including retail, public digital signage networks, theme parks, and other public franchises.

Snibbe Interactive recently completed three new interactive exhibits at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry for You! The Experience. This groundbreaking exhibition creates a nonlinear social multi-user experience that mirrors the way people experience media today – through the lens of the personal, social, and online.

As the centerpiece of the exhibition, MSI commissioned Snibbe Interactive to create a twenty-four foot wide multi-projector interactive wall that accommodates dozens, and sometimes hundreds of simultaneous visitors.

The purpose of Get in the Action is simply to get people to move as if they were in an sporting class. In the center of a large screen a video coach demonstrates one of four activities: Basketball, Hip Hop Dancing, Tai Chi, and Yoga. As people follow along, magical motion effects create on-screen trails that outline their past movements, inspired by sports science analysis and visualizations similar to those that professional athletes use. These trails make the audience excited to follow along. In a free play session, people’s outlines overlap in an open-ended experience that encourages even the shyest person to dance and play with his body. Get in the Action can hold people for long durations and promotes physical exercise and social engagement.

Laugh Garden is a cluster of monitors with video faces that play on each screen. When people move in front of a monitor, the face begins to chuckle, to laugh, and eventually to roar. The greater each person’s movement, the greater the laughter. Groups of people can make the whole garden laugh together, and the laughter spreads quickly to the visitors themselves creating a social experience. The exhibit utilizes our newer depth-sensing three-dimensional SocialMirror technologies.

With Support Networks people create personalized collages about their network of friends and family. Using a touchscreen monitor, a person enters her name, which appears at the center of a large wall-mounted display. Next, the visitor enters the names of several friends. As the visitor answers questions about her social relationships, the names of people who provide more support become larger and larger. With our SocialShare add-on, the collages can be posted directly to Facebook and other social networks, or emailed to friends.

We’ve just published our 2010 catalog of interactive experiences in print and PDF formats. Our products pages will always have the most up-to-date listings of our product lines, which increase monthly. However, this compact 8-page document neatly summarizes our platforms and many products and is available in print format. You can download a copy right now, or request a print copy from our office.

Customers in Entertainment, Museums and Marketing can use this catalog to order unmodified ready-to-ship experiences; or as a basis for customized and unique experiences. Don’t hesitate to contact us about your project.

Snibbe Interactive will be exhibiting this week at the The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Expo in Las Vegas (IAAPA 2009). Scott Snibbe will be there in person to meet with clients and visitors, and we’ll be demonstrating several SocialScreen products, customized for entertainment applications. Come visit us at booth number 5105 at the Las Vegas Convention Center from November 17-20.

A pair of amateur filmmakers have created an anachronistic pirate movie using the Deep Walls ShadowMosaic interactive installation installed at Technorama in Switzerland. Click below to watch the whole movie “Der Raub” created by Philipp Röthlin and Manuel Gübeli. Their movie is a new twist on the growing phenomenon of Machinima – creating movies from videogame graphics engines such as Doom, Quake, and Grand Theft Auto. In this case, the full-body input of social immersive media allows actors, costumes, and props to immediately become part of the performance.

Welcome to the Snibbe Interactive blog. As part of the launch of our new website, we have also launched this blog, to discuss all aspects of social immersive media. Look here for frequently updated information on our new products, new installations in science museums, new immersive interactive branding experiences, and new entertainment and theme park experiences. We’ll also be featuring articles on social immersive media platforms and technologies involving projectors, displays, and both regular and stereoscopic/three-dimensional cameras. And we plan to include articles on design principles, user studies, educational studies, interactive arts and media, positive outcomes for branding and retail to enhance sales, interviews, and commentary on this young and exciting medium.

The site was designed in-house, and implemented ably by Michael O’Neal of Daka Designs.