antarcticavirtua.net — A project to make an immersive Virtual Antarctica

The blog for the Mawson's Huts Foundation 2007-8 Expedition can be found here:

http://mawsonshutsexpedition2007-8.blogspot.com/

I set this up in blogger because of the convenient email-to-post feature in blogger, that enabled us to post text and images via email over the iridum phone - our only form of internet access (i.e. no web-bowsing) - with posts limited to 25kb, except for the occasional picture post (up tp 100kb!).

This is one of those things that you superstitiously don't want to talk about too much before it comes true - but it's true! I've found out - today - that I've passed my final medical approval for the forthcoming expedition to Mawson's Huts with the Mawson's Huts Foundation - a dream, for me, of 7 years - ever since I returned to Australia from Berlin in 1999. It involved litres (joke) of blood tests, ECG, audiometry, snellen charts, poking, prodding, palpation - just about everything (almost) you could imagine, being assessed as a biological machine. I conclude that I am well and truly alive and can expect to persist for the foreseeable future. This is a good thing. I like being alive.

As for the adventure of sailing to the End of the Earth - I am, well, thrilled; amazed - it's been such a journey - but worth every minute. I'll post more details as I embark on this unfolding voyage into my unknown future. It will be the most amazing thing to finally see this place that I have imagined and virtually imaged, for so many years, in all its reality - some empirical resemblance of a dream, but only made real by persisting in that dream and eventually, concretely, rushing into reality. We sail on December 5th, 2007.

Here's a few photos showing the installed works from Antarctica Virtua at the Curtin Gallery, for the Imagining Antarctica exhibition at the Perth International Arts Festival, 2007.

A short videoblog, where I wander around the three back areas of "Antarctica Virtua" at the "IMAGINinG Antarctica" exhibition that opened at the John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, on Thursday Feb. 8th at 6pm. It was a mad rush (as usual) at the end, though Paul and I essentially had everything up and running by 3pm that day. In this short blog I look at the spaces behind the screens - at the opening there were lots of comments like "How do they do that?" - so here some of the underpinning technology is explained - it's moderately involved and needs lots of delicate set-up and finessing for the 3D illusion to appear seamlessly. I'm particularly happy with the three-screen piece "Voyage of the Golovnin" - as I was initially underwhelmed by the quality of the video - but thankfully it looks stunning!

I'm currently working like a maniac to finish all the content for "IMAGINinG Antarctica", an exhibition put on by the Curtin Gallery (Curtin University - my old alma mater) for the Perth International Arts Festival. Nothing quite like an exhibition to focus the mind!

It's proving to be an immense amount of work, as the logistics of it all are quite prodigious, for a kind of zero-budget production process such as mine. Fortunately I have the support of the Western Australian SuperComputer Project (WASP) and the inestimable Paul Bourke, along with, surprisingly enough, an old mate of mine, Chris Malcom - who happens to be the exhibition designer, builder, tech person and so on. Chris and I went to Art School (WAIT - now Curtin) together, so it has been great to re-acquaint after many, many years. Between Paul, Chris and I, along with Apple W.A. and the Curtin Gallery, we're managing to mount 5 stereoscopic installations of my work around/about Antarctica (along with extensive material from the Kerry Stokes collection, and other work by Stephen Eastaugh and other people whose names I forget - curated by Ted Snell, the Director, and John Stringer from the Stokes Collection.)

I've made a fair bit of progress (now that I finally have some time, amazingly enough) upon working out the scene for Mawson's Hut. This has taken a lot of effort - as I am aiming for something photorealistic and reasonably accurate. So I've been tweaking the landscape model and working on the CAD model in a variety of 3D packages - Cinema 4D XL, Vue 5 Infinite, Google SketchUp and Blender. Why so many?

This is the first spherical/cubic panorama I've made of Mawson's Hut at Cape Denison. It's a cubic QTVR movie, using a landscape model derived from satellite and ground survey data from the Australian Antarctic Divison and a CAD model from the Mawson's Hut Foundation Heritage Architect, Adrian Welke (of Troppo Architects.) As such, it is a very provisional test - you can see the hut is a skeleton, the landscape texturing is not convincing, and there are clearly rendering problems with the lens flares! I'm trying out Vue pro Infinite 5 (version 6 has just been released,) which is a wonderful program - but struggles with this data on my macintel laptop: time to move this onto some machines with serious grunt, as the output will be amazing.

This is a short demo movie I made for the Perth SIGGRAPH Chapter showreel for SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston. It's a composite of various things I've done over the years - high-resolution renderings of the Cape Dension area (based upon AAD data and IKONOS satellite imagery - DEM's rendered in Terragen,) some examples of Frank Hurley's photography (courtesy the Mawson Collection and restored for the Tasmanian Museum show), a brief animation of Mawson's Hut based upn Adrian Welke's marvellous CAD model and location photography (lots more work to be done on this - but I have the material!) and, finally, some of the wonderful footage I shot (in stereo) during my recent adventure to Antarctica with the Australian Antarctic Division.

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I've made quite a few advances on this: principally having achieved support via the WASP (Western Australian Supercomputer Project) via the incredible support of the Director, Karen Haines. This means I currently have access to a top-flight G5, two very nice projectors, and the amazing circumstance - 7 weeks of inter-semester break to get this all happening. I've been digitising my tapes - each one comes in at ~8.2GB per hour for 16:9 25p HDV, so with 20 hrs I had to buy a new 500GB drive just to store this stuff. It's huge. Even the quad G5 is making a slow progress through the output (2048x720, when cropped), and I can't use EDLs for left/right as there are timecode issues. I'll look into proxies, but I suspect it will be no good for frame-accurate hi-def video. This is basically so far out on a limb that you need to invent new ways of doing things. Very interesting. I'm inventing the workflow.

I had a wonderful insight tonight: I've been thinking through the engineering problem of how to make a frame on which to stretch my 2.4x1.8m screen of polarising fabric. I've been through wood, PVC piping and finally decided that welding up a steel frame would be the way - it should be tensile yet collapsible etc. I kept saying to people - it's kind of like a trampoline.

Update: as of July 25th 2006, the installation at TMAG has received over 150,000 visitors.

A short (12 minute) web version of "Home of the Blizzard" (my stereoscopic movie exploring original stereoscopic images by Frank Hurley and Andrew Watson of Mawsons' 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition)- roughly edited from the version that shows exclusively at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. The entire program is currently twice as long, and there is so much more I couldn't include in that - hours of material! All of it nearly-100-years-old and in stereoscopic 3D - the first ever views of this area of Antarctica: the men who went there; what they did; rarely visited even to this day. A time machine voyage into Antarctic History, with a living sense of purpose and the actuality of the people and their world - it may be black and white, but stereoscopic depth gives us a whole new sense of the reality of what they did: remarkable, living stuff.