Virtual RealityProject_
<Digital Ghost>
Concept The idea of digital ghosts started from skepticism about the concept of augmented reality, because the world is already too complicated to add additional information. In our modern world, information abounds, and even though I use smart digital mobile devices, I feel ‘alienated’ from the real world. Having access to this additional information is like seeing things that don’t really exist, like a so-called ‘possessed person’ who imagines things that aren’t real. This is related to the surrealist’s method of matching the way possessed people experience the world: whatever they have seen or experienced, they dramatized and made a re-creation of their experiences to maximize the visual experience. If we continue to develop things like cloud-based social networking, augmented reality software, and holograms, we will see our digital ghosts live for eternity in the internet. Suppose our computers back up everything that happens on our computer to the cloud. By gathering our Facebook, email conversations, photos, resumes, all of our shopping and entertainment preferences, GPS traces, and even our voices, the program could piece together an avatar of us that could “live” forever. Imagine opening gifts while seven generations of your family in the form of holographic projections join the celebration. The ghosts would watch the action, talk among themselves, and join in to sing Happy Birthday, all without prompting from the living. Digital ghosts need to see their environment to interact properly. Phones will all have video “eyes” someday, as will most computers. The new Xbox Kinect has “eyes” that literally follow your movement around the room. These ghosts could soon arrive and interact with us.
Process
>1 Place hunting Non-place is a term used by Marc Augé (Non-Places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity) to describe places created by supermodernity. Non-places, mediated, ephemeral and individually oriented, are places formed in relations to certain ends (s.a. leisure, transport, transit and surveillance). Non-places, places you temporarily pass through, include cash machines, airports, motorways and the complex mass of cabled and wireless networks. [Anthropological] places, such as a public square and park, are defined by their inherent social nature, have a history and are formed by local references and codes, Augé describes our contemporary reality where these two modalities of place and non-place are not mutually exlusive, but made up of intertwinings and interminglings between them. De Certeau also makes the distinction between places and non-places in regards to the opposition between space and place experienced through the act of walking. A place, an assembly of elements existing in a particular order, becomes animated or a ‘space; by the motion of a moving body. For Certeau, ‘to walk is to lack a place’ and ‘is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper’. So I decide to shoot in the subway station which is non-place.
>2 Cloth making I stitched ping pong balls into the black jacket and the tights to enable motiontracking. Later, I added sticks to extend the balls so the tracking could be more surrealistic.
>3. Shooting Shot in 20 second take, 1280x720 pixel, Canon Handycam, on the Korean subway airway line.
>4. Tracking
With SynthEyes, each ball can be tracked by designated points in each frame. Before this, the movie had to be cut by continuous steel images.
>5. 3d Modeling With Maya, I made the 3D model for augmented reality based on the conception of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ghost:â&#x20AC;&#x2122; fur, bisecting cubic, morphed pipe lines.
>6. Final Movie
<Digital Ghost> by Jinseong Kim, 2011/ AR project_2, 20’’ https://vimeo.com/33239703