INDUSTRY ICONS
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LLC’s lab integrates AI and spatial tech, gearing students for their careers
students was encouraging and the increase in technical complexity in students’ work was remarkable. The Creative Technology Lab is still there today and is constantly evolving. Has there been a project that was particularly challenging? Sticking with the Creative Technology Lab, when it comes to higher education the biggest challenge is often funding. Though universities like to encourage innovation, there’s a lot of due diligence which must go into a sizable investment like that. Also – looking at the knock-on implications – it was in central London where real estate is in high demand, so allocating space for any resources comes at the expense of something else. Staffing is an interesting challenge as well. As part of the investment, we were able to bring in several new technical instructors. If you look at disciplines like XR, practitioners with that expertise are scarce and in high demand. There are times where people with experience in more established technologies might be tempted to come out of the commercial sector and step into education for a while, where they get that teaching bug and want to share their knowledge and expertise – I know I certainly did! But at that time, we were dealing with new and emerging technologies, resulting in a smaller pool of talent. Pair that with trying to compete against commercial salaries – which are typically higher than academic ones – finding the right mix of skills and balance of people with expertise, then being able to retain them within the organisation is difficult. With the Creative Technology Lab, we were attempting to find new ways of exposing students to technically complex technologies they may have limited prior experience with. We wanted them to be able to learn and experiment. For example, in a screening room, they should be able to bypass the audio system and ingest content from their own devices, or take over the media layer for digital signage and LED walls within the building. You want them to be able to harness every piece of technology in the landscape. What are your favourite AV tools? The things which excite me the most relate to the projects that I have been working on in the last couple of years, which mostly involved large, immersive displays. The software and hardware for projection mapping 15 years ago was fairly rudimentary, with a large portion of it done using flaky software. There were some great tools, but they often had significant limitations. In recent years, I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with the evolved descendants of those early tools, including media platforms such as D3 from Disguise as well as Pixera from AV Stumpfl, plus various 7thSense
equipment. Having the chance to work with all these platforms and tools has been exciting; seeing their capabilities at pushing millions of pixels in a complex, immersive AV space has been amazing. Those tools are constantly evolving and breaking new ground – for example, 7thSense working on Sphere in Las Vegas, driving its enormous LED surfaces. That ability to push hundreds of millions of pixels in real time from various sources – and helping creative agencies to develop the workflows needed to produce content for those complex surfaces – is a huge achievement. Pixera was particularly useful when I worked on several projection mapping
installations which dealt with a wide range of ultra high-resolution source media. It allowed us to configure complex, composite timelines with interactives, triggers and integrated show control. The frame-level accuracy, precise synchronisation, camera-based warp and blend, as well as colour matching offered by Pixera were simply incredible. Where Disguise sits in terms of XR and virtual production (VP) makes them a great partner to have in your corner. I have worked with them on projects both in academia and the private sector; the capabilities and extensibility of their platform is very impressive.
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