The Ascent, by xxxy, is a live-action, participatory theatrical ride/experience that combines mind-control and levitation via a custom-built, automated show-control system. This interactive installation is experienced by a single participant—or rider—and an audience ranging from 20 to 150 people who watch from an observation deck. The experience is dynamically driven by an EEG sensor that reads the individual rider’s brainwaves and thought patterns. Outfitted with the EEG headset, and wearing a waist harness, individual riders marshal their calm, focus, and concentration, and attempt to levitate themselves more than thirty feet into the air through fields of dynamically responsive sound and light. The experience is full of obstacles and contradictions. As riders ascend via the power of their concentration, the sound and lights create a storm of stimuli that conspires to distract them from achieving their goal: levitating into “transcendence,” and “winning” by becoming the central figure in a playfully overblown Renaissance tableau. The paradox is that in order to succeed, the riders need to release their desire for achievement, and contend with what might be the biggest obstacle: themselves.

xxxyprojects.com/?page_id=843

www.porsandrao.com/works/

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a simple way to convert two-dimensional patterns into three-dimensional (3-D) objects using only light.

news.ncsu.edu/releases/wmsdickeyfolding/

Authors: Kevin Karsch, Varsha Hedau, David Forsyth, Derek Hoiem

Abstract: We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference. Further, our study shows that our method is competitive with other insertion methods while requiring less scene information. We also collected new illumination and reflectance datasets; renderings produced by our system compare well to ground truth.

dangrayber.com/portfolio.htm

Nendo cast clear acrylic in a form taken from a heavy-grain wood plank, repeated, then assembled the resulting pieces to produce a table top of so-called “transparent wood.”

As Nendo tells it: “We reproduced the butt ends faithfully and bevelled [SIC] the edges like floorboards, and matched the grains ends and dimensions of the wood used for the table legs to the transparent wood to create a unified piece.”

From afar, the white table looks like translucent glass; only up close does the wood grain lurch into view. The black table, on the other hand, could almost pass for wood at first glace. But zoom in, and it reveals its ghost-like transparency.

www.nendo.jp/en/works/detail.php?y=2011&t=196

www.nikramage.com/machines/unpluggermov.htm

A whimsical suicidal machine…

The system depicted was created by combining three components: a chatbot, a text-to-speech synthesizer, and an avatar renderer.

Chatbots are machines designed to emulate the conversational abilities of humans, conversing with a human user and generally attempting to convince the user into thinking that the machine is human. In such a scenario, if a sufficiently adept human on one end is fooled into thinking the machine is another human, the machine would be credited as passing the famous Turing Test for intelligence. Over 60 years after its proposal by Alan Turing, there are arguably still no machines capable of passing this test. The chatbot we initially used was Eliza, a prominent early milestone from AI’s infancy in the 1960′s. This tended to produce fairly boring conversations, so we switched to a much smarter, constantly learning chatbot: Cleverbot. Publicly available on Cleverbot.com, this state of the art chat engine was created by AI researcher Rollo Carpenter, who can be contacted via his company, Existor. Cleverbot will continue to learn, and Existor are soon to add new capabilities aiming at a Turing Test pass sooner than you might expect.

The second piece of the system is the text-to-speech synthesizer, which takes the text generated by the chatbot and creates a spoken, audio version. There are many services able to accomplish this; we chose Acapela because it was easy to use and sounded decent.

The final piece is the avatar renderer, which synthesizes an animated character whose gestures and lips are synced to the sound stream. For this we used Living Actor Presenter.

creativemachines.cornell.edu/AI-vs-AI