I direct, design and develop experiences that blend physical and digital. My inventive use of technology creates a space for design and story to thrive, resulting in compelling experiences that educate, delight and transform. Read More.
Microsoft commissioned Melissa Painter to create an experience for the launch of Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Melissa and I collaborated to create an experience with the goal to reach audiences that are new to virtual reality and don't necessarily identify as "gamer" or "technical".
We achieved this by creating an immersive experience that encourages the audience to move their body along with a careful choreography of dancers and athletes. As they move with the avatars they engage in a collaborative dance that changes the virtual environment in delightful ways.
My contribution was collaborating on concept, experience design and managing the team through the technical execution and launch.
Ask me about: Motion Capture, Virtual Environments, Inverse Kinematics, Anthropomorphism.
MOVE Studio is part of Microsofts in-store retail experience introducing consumers to Mixed Reality and is available from the Windows Store.
Review of MOVE Studio by VR/Focus
Come into a space where unfettered movement takes you in unexpected directions. Yes, this is unlike anything you've seen or experienced before. You are transported—scene by scene—to a place of pure energy, grace, and athleticism.
Where the fluid poetry of dance and art meets the explosive power of competitive sport. Where basic movements push the bounds of gravity, where your own power and grace will astound you.
The experience is as mesmerizing as it is surprising, destined to fill you with a sense of joy and wonder. An experience so amazing you will want a record of it. Of course, that's possible too.
Move Studio world premier at Future of Storytelling Festival 2017
This mixed reality piece reinterprets an original choreography set to David Bowie's iconic song “Heroes.”
A Samsung Gear headset immerses the viewer in 360 degree VR with an athletic dance set in the historic United Artists Theatre in Los Angeles.
Then a HoloLens adorned with a crown transforms another room into mixed reality with virtual avatars animated through motion capture. The viewer merges with the dancers, affecting pacing and scene changes, the exploration culminating in the pure delight of holographs dancing in the palm of one’s hand.
Heroes premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2017, in collaboration with Melissa Painter and MPC VR. With support from Unity Technologies, Oculus, Nokia Ozo, The Theater at Ace Hotel, House of Moves, AMD Radeon, HP.
Press:
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s permanent exhibit, “The Play is the Thing,” includes my installation, On Stage.
It creates the illusion of standing under the lights of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, before a packed house, playing the role of Hamlet, speaking to the ghost of his father.
A life-sized display coupled with intelligent sensing ensures the actor (Ewart James Walters) always looks the visitor in the eye.
A grant from Microsoft Research to explore the use of mixed reality in trade education led to my instructing a community college class, concepting, designing and building a Holographic Transmission.
The completed holograph was then tested at the same school by automotive students, who were able to demonstrate deep understanding of complex moving parts 500% faster than without the HoloLens. A white paper detailed our learnings.
This project was a collaboration of Oregon Story Board and Clackamas Community College, and key individuals including Ben Fischler, Anthony Pires, J Bills, Shelly Midthun and Rick Lockwood.
This installation advances the traditional soapbox to combine freedom of expression with the anonymity of a voting booth, and the verifiable results of a poll. I call it The Issue Machine.
It was stationed at Pioneer Courthouse Square as the headquarters for Design Week Portland 2016. The public was invited to choose one of 5 issues associated with the city’s brisk evolution and write their concern and their plan on a tag. Each visitor then lowered the tag into the Issue Machine, a red light signaled the registration of their “vote,” which could then be hung on one of 47 posts positioned in the square, each corresponding to a specific neighborhood.
Tags were designed with patterns that were automatically, captured, scanned and recognized by our software. People unable to attend submitted their concerns though a companion website that updated the tally in real time. Volunteers onsite wrote all entries on physical tags and hung them in the square.
This project spans the widest array of interfaces: spatial (public square) to physical (wooden box, tags) to digital (site) to cloud (image processing). The Issue Machine blends modern serverless cloud-based image processing with local micro controller (Raspberry Pi) image capture.
Report of findings from Design Week Portland
Roles: Sponsor, concept, technical direction, team management.
Ask me about: Lab driven process, anthropomorphizing, friction (the physics kind).
A project by Second Story
http://secondstory.com/project/landscapes
"A kinetic sculpture turned a vacant storefront in Portland, Ore., into a space for interaction and reflection.
Landscapes are a study in change. Whether physical or cultural, shifts occur from moment to moment. Sometimes change is striking. Other times, it sneaks up on you.
The Landscapes installation was an exploration of this dynamic. Kinetic, responsive, and always moving, it integrated responsive technology, robotics, LED lighting, and simple origami forms to create a meditative experience inspired by Portland’s perpetual state of evolution."
Roles: Concept, Pitch, Prototyping, Executive technical direction, Team management and event installation.
Ask me about: Blending physical and digital where you don't end up seeing the technology. The use of RFID tokens, physical computing, peppers ghost optics with a tablet and live video capture booths.
A project by Second Story
http://secondstory.com/project/hermes-bh
"Blending classic style and spectacle with technological innovation, a suite of interactive experiences enhanced the magic at an exclusive event celebrating the opening of Hermès’ renovated Beverly Hills boutique.
In collaboration with our colleagues at SapientNitro, Second Story created an array of installations for guests to enjoy. The experiences took a cue from the brand’s long legacy in fashion, seamlessly integrating technology into “analog” moments and connecting traditional means of interaction with modern social media."
"Upon arrival, each guest was given a laser-cut, RFID-enabled wooden token, their key to unlock the interactives they encountered throughout the evening. This coin captured and saved digital content they collected to be viewed and shared after the party.
The interactives each offered a modern take on familiar coin-operated games. The old “Pepper’s Ghost” optical illusion was revived inside a 1950s-style boardwalk viewfinder that let guests create their own custom postcards by adjusting 3D layers. Tilt-shift photography enhanced conventional “peephole” installations, providing fun and surprising moments of discovery for viewers. We enlivened the ubiquitous photo booth by transforming it into the equivalent of a Hollywood “green screen” film set. Guests climbed into a replica 1930s Mercedes Gazelle, selected props and accessories, and chose the landscape to play behind them on a large-scale monitor. When they activated the interactive with their token, their big scene was recorded and displayed on a large live feed for them to watch (and for those in line to see). Finally, guests had the opportunity to interact with the work of renowned designer Anthony Burrill, playing with his animations to create their own visual composition with a custom soundtrack.
After the party, guests received a personal invitation to a microsite where they could retrieve the content collected by their token and share it with friends. These digital souvenirs made playful keepsakes from a night to remember with Hermès."
Here to There is an exploration in wearable storytelling. I was the instigator and sponsor of the project. My aim was to get complete strangers to stand uncomfortably close to each other and to challenge the studio's engineers and designers around what a mobile experience can be.
Roles: Sponsor, concept, technical direction, team management, prototyping, event management.
Ask me about: Wearable storytelling, stranger danger, proximity based experiences, trust.
A project by Second Story
http://secondstory.com/project/here-to-there
"A narrative experiment conducted using mobile beacons and choreographed movement considered the question: “What happens when the story finds you?”
The Tribeca Film Festival’s digital and interactives team invited Second Story to participate in the 2015 TFI Interactive Playground. Collaborating with keynote speaker Lucy McRae, we crafted a storytelling experiment exploring how presence, physical space, and human intervention could combine with technology to tell a story.
In Here to There, the audience discovered a futuristic three-part narrative, written by McRae, through the use of wearable devices and actors. The actors wore Relators, custom helmets that communicated the story to the audience, while festival attendees sported custom headphones called Receivers. When a Receiver came into proximity with a Relator, the audience heard parts of the story. Aided by the choreography of the actors, participants experienced a non-linear narrative built from their interactions with the characters.
We leveraged our product design expertise to create visually distinctive devices that delighted the crowd and provided plenty of photo ops. Here to There took social media by storm and was prominently featured in the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Daily Wrap Up” video. The experiment used technology to connect people in a human way, creating an immersive, connected experience that enabled users to remain aware, present, and even social in their surroundings."
Shape of Story tries to reimagine how we engage with documentary short film. Often the film maker wants to start a dialog, however the setting of the film theatre is not conducive to this. Shape of Story changes this by giving the audience agency to provide feedback during the film. A facilitator can use this input afterward to kick-start a conversation.
Role: Sponsor, concepting, team management.
Ask me about: Group engagements, mass mobile interfaces.
A project by Second Story
http://secondstory.com/project/shape-of-story
"Using a smartphone-enabled web application, audience members participated in an interactive screening to spark conversation.
A one-night only event as part of 2013’s Design Week Portland, Shape of Story transformed the historic Hollywood Theatre into a dynamic space for dialogue and debate. With their mobile phones in-hand, movie-goers gathered to watch short media pieces from the University of Oregon’s Multimedia Journalism master’s program, Spin Film, Periscopic, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and The Oregonian, all focused on issues related to gun ownership. As the films played, a smartphone-enabled web app allowed viewers to “tag” moments of emotional impact using a simple gesture: a tap. After each piece, the crowd’s marks were aggregated and visualized on the big screen to illustrate the ebb and flow of their engagement. They were given a window of several minutes in which to contextualize their reactions and provide feedback on what they’d seen.
After all seven pieces had been shown, the shape of each story and a curated selection of the submitted comments were displayed while a moderator, Dave Miller from OPB’s “Think Out Loud,” facilitated an engaging discussion structured around the audience’s contributions. The evening offered attendees a unique collective theater-going experience that integrated technology in a considered, unobtrusive way.
We look forward to further exploring this experimental technology to see what it can do. Valuable for filmmakers to gather input to enhance their work and as a tool to collect feedback to initiate thoughtful discourse, the possibilities for Shape of Story are endless."
All images provided by Wes Pope. Footage provided by Kate Szrom, Summer Hatfield, Katelyn Black, and Wes Pope.
The launch event of the largest screen on Times Square was a great opportunity to create truly impactful visuals. My aim with the project was to create a screen that was alive, that tells a story for longer than a few seconds, as is typical on billboards. It was very satisfying to see VIP's re-mix the work of Universal Everything and create a playlist that ran for 2 weeks, never the same, always beautiful.
Roles: Concept, pitch, technical direction, team management, render pipeline management, A/V systems design and event installation oversight.
Ask me about: Media servers for large scale video installations, collaborative creation / remixing experiences.
A project by Second Story
http://secondstory.com/project/vornado
"This cutting-edge display is the largest in the world, creating a digital canvas that stretches nine stories high and wraps an entire city block.
Second Story collaborated with digital artists Universal Everything, bringing the screen to life with a spectacular generative graphic takeover that invited the public into the experience as co-creators, not just spectators.
VIP guests were invited to participate in interactive co-creation of the content that launched the screen from a custom designed space constructed specifically for the event in 2500 square feet of “cold shell” retail space immediately below the screen."
With Triumph of the Winter Queen I wanted to push how we traditionally interpret paintings. We found an opportunity to blend programmatic theatrical lighting with motion graphics and traditional storytelling. The result is an immersive blended experience that brings to life the story caught in the painting.
Role: Concept, Pitch, Prototyping, Executive technical direction, Team management, Programming
Ask me about: Theatrical lighting control, immersive storytelling, pre visualization, fabrication
A project by Second Story
http://secondstory.com/project/honthorst
"This immersive digital experience draws viewers into Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst’s 1636 masterpiece Triumph of the Winter Queen: Allegory of the Just, a monumental portrait inspired by the turbulent lives of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V, once the King and Queen of Bohemia.
Together with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Second Story created a digital presentation that immerses viewers in the allegorical portrait. Displayed on two 12’ glass panels flanking the painting, it is enhanced by a custom lighting program that highlights details of the painting that might be otherwise overlooked. The film’s narration contextualizes the work, sharing the rich history of Stuart and her family while also explaining the significance of the symbols Honthorst depicts. Visitors to the gallery leave with an enriched knowledge of the Winter Queen, her family, and the world in which she lived."
