digital art | projectmap

D.I.Y

Posted on April 9, 2015 by scamp123

For anybody that wants to create, now is the perfect time. There are so many ways to do so many different things due to the fact that we are able to share ideas and communicate so easily with each other online.

For budding musicians, programs like Ableton and media services like SoundCloud have given them the platform they need to create their own stuff without the help of professional (and expensive) producers/studios. But for other forms of digital art like projection mapping, it’s a little more difficult.

High quality projectors can be expensive, and affordable programs can be hard to come by for amateurs. However the people behind HeavyM plan to change this.

Launching in early 2015 HeavyM is a free, downloadable tool that gives anybody with a laptop and a projector the chance to give projection mapping a shot. “Putting projection mapping in locations not normally possible” is it’s vision, and hopefully we’ll be able to see some examples of it very soon.

For most of us, if we’ve seen projection mapping anywhere it’s been at a festival or at a live music show.

Dillon Francis, Childish Gambino (seen above), Flying Lotus, Arcade Fire and Skrillex are among some of the most noted displays, and with technology we can now all try, it might be a matter of time until projection mapping makes its way onto the local club scene and into smaller shows and festivals.

Has it already? If you’ve seen any amateur displays emerging please share them with us!

Where It All Began

Posted on April 1, 2015 by scamp123

It’s fair to say that projection mapping has made it’s mark in the digital art scene over the past few years. Look it up and you’ll find tonnes of examples of new displays from all around the world; independent artists, amateurs, musicians, musical festivals, advertisers, big brands at all. But where did it all start?

Put simply, projection mapping is the art of projecting onto a three dimensional surface, and it’s been around longer than you’d expect.

Although only recently exploding onto the scene, what we know to be the first example of projection mapping was seen at Disneyland California in 1969 at the beginning of the iconic Haunted Mansion ride. 16mm footage was projected onto the five sculptures known as the “Grim Grinning Ghosts”

Following an immersive art installation in 1980, Disney patenting “Apparatus and method for projection upon a three-dimensional object and GE following suit in 1994, in 1998 projection began picking up steam. Once it was explored in academia, the term ‘Spatial Augmented Reality’ was born from UNC Chapel Hill academics, with a paper called the “Office of the Future”. Basically, this office foresaw a world where anything could be projected upon, and from the picture below they weren’t far off some of the things we see in every second sci-fi film.

Pretty cool.