Snibbe Interactive founder Scott Snibbe was the featured innovator on CNN’s The Next List, which profiles forward-looking thinkers in the fields of tech, science and social change. Clips are below!
Producer Tracy Dorsey brought her crew to Snibbe Interactive headquarters in San Francisco for a three-day shoot that resulted in an intimate and extensive portrait of Snibbe, who, among other projects, reflects on his recent work with James Cameron’s interactive “Avatar” exhibition at the EMP Museum, and Bjork’s breakthrough Biophilia App.
What’s next? Says Dorsey, “He envisions a fully participatory experience, one where your movements will actually change the story and affect what happens around you. It may sound far-fetched, but Scott says all he needs is the right partner.”
While debating how to name our newest SocialScreen product, we threw dozens of names into the proverbial hat. This hat started to resemble one of Magritte’s dour derbies as the names became more and more surreal. I won’t list them here but suffice it to say, each struggled to capture the sense of wonder this new interactive wall product creates in its users.
Of course, being children of a certain generation, we were avoiding the inevitable “WonderWall.” In our lifetimes, there have been at least two other “wonder walls” – the late 60s film by Joe Massot (with a soundtrack by then Beatle George Harrison no less) and Oasis, Beatle wannabes, whose mid-90s tune references it.
Urban Dictionary has three definitions that range from an object of obsession to: “A barrier which separates the mundane from the Transcendent Reality. A true Wonderwall will always have…an opening which allows anyone a glimpse of what lies beyond.”
For our purposes, this definition has a lot of appeal though we like to think of the Snibbe Interactive WonderWall™ is less a barrier and more of a door to the imagination. The WonderWall invites visitors to move and manipulate customized virtual objects in a an interactive experience unlike anything else. For Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, a space-themed WonderWall features a virtual telescopic lens that peers into deep space, space-walking astronauts, and the Mars Rover you build yourself. Each exhibit engages both visitors’ minds and bodies as they maneuver the inviting animations on screen.
With Snibbe Interactive’s WonderWall,the customization possibilities are endless, though all are bound to be fun and physical and sure to inspire, yep, wonder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Watch Scott Snibbe’s talk on Social Immersive Media at Stanford University’s Seminar on People, Computers, and Design organized by Professor Terry Winograd last May. The talk gives an in-depth presentation of a theory and practice of Social Immersive Media – augmented reality that focuses on social interaction – with specific applications in museum exhibits, and marketing, and art. The Academic CHI Paper on which this talk is based won best paper of the conference in 2009:
Snibbe Interactive founder Scott Snibbe was the featured innovator on CNN’s The Next List, which profiles forward-looking thinkers in the fields of tech, science and social change. Clips are below!
