The enthusiasm that accompanied the dawn of this new high-tech age in the 1980s and 90s is back, with the technology deployed in today’s data glasses (head-mounted displays) finally seeming to be able to live up to the visions that preceded it. VR, AR and MR have become a playground of multifarious pursuits: the gaming sector and film industry, applications in the educational field and tourism market, works of art and architecture, the creative economy, performance and the theater.

The VRLab in the Ars Electronica Center’s Main Gallery showcases the latest VR, AR and MR technologies. In addition to applications by filmmakers and animators as well as artistic approaches, the VRLab relates the history of virtual and augmented reality’s development. What did eighteenth-century spatial illusions look like, how did we progress from the stereoscope to the Oculus Rift, and in which directions will VR and AR be advancing in days to come? The VRLab provides insights into these questions.

Kitchen Budapest (HU)

Since the first industrial revolution, automation has been one of the primary instruments of increasing productivity, that is replacing human workforce with task-performing machines. The thermo-mechanical models of the early industrial age have now evolved by into more complex electro-computational networks, where scripted interactions are staking out an ever-growing number of domains and specialist fields.

Under algorithmic capitalism, automation (robotics with automated thought—AI) are disrupting a large segment of industry and life as we know it: from the self-driving cars reinventing transport, chatbots reinventing friendship, unmanned drones reinventing war, synthetic bodies/persons reinventing human rights, to e-government reinventing politics.

In contrast to the perceived obfuscation in much of the computational protocols today, Training 2038 stages a scenario where people are given a voice to provide feedback on systems that are just taking shape. In the safe space of a private VR experience, an extensive survey is underway in the form of a dialog played out between an embodied conversational bot and a human user. With no moral conscience, how would an automated decision tree behave?

Credits

Kitchen Budapest is Gábor Pribék (HU), Iván Rohonyi-Demkó (HU), Jonathan Ravasz (HU), Filip Ruisl (SK), Richárd Nagyfi (HU), Szilvi Német (HU), Attila Nemes (HU), Patrik Makrai (HU), Judit Varga (HU), Orsolya Forster (HU), Benjamin A. Balla and Healium Decoration (HU)

Supported by Telekom Group Hungary

Manipulating the controller in the form of a paintbrush proceeds intuitively and precisely, and brings forth impressive digital sculptures.

Exploring the idea of geomorphology, mathematics and understanding the world, Morphogenesis requires audience to be sentient, not just receivers. It invites the viewer to a poetic and sensational world, where space becomes infinity, the primal sense of the immaterial world is experienced and the process of creation is reevaluated.

Morphogenesis is part of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival, that screens a selection of the most outstanding animated works honored by the Prix Ars Electronica jury in recognition of their substantive and stylistic quality. This lineup impressively gets across how the genre itself has flourished of late and the extent to which it now pervades our everyday life.

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Many years ago, it was a future fantasy, today it is reality: At the Holodeck you can draw your own world and objects in 3D Paint. Then you can upload it to the Microsoft HoloLens and enter your self-made world!

At the Holodeck you can try out the newest VR-technology and learn about the huge number of functions and possibilities.

Where do you want to go?

„computer, exit!”

The interactive elements enable visitors to use eye control to navigate through the museum and access additional information about the works of art they are looking at. High-resolution 360-degree video sequences are combined with a 3D audio narration, which provides an immersive experience in text and image as well as with spatially variable sound. Users can select from among three narrative strands. They can thus determine the storyline themselves as they move about among the works of art. A complete round trip through all the museum’s galleries and collections of antiquities as well as an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the conservators’ workshop—Österreich Werbung’s VR production delivers total immersion in the collection of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

His aim was to enable people today to experience that center of Jewish religious life. Now his work has made it possible for the Ars Electronica Futurelab to produce a 3D visualization that lets visitors to Deep Space 8K take a virtual tour of the Linz Synagogue. The reconstruction is supplemented by high-definition photographs of ceremonial objects—the curtain covering the ark in which Torah scrolls are kept, a pointer used when reading the parchment scroll, and a decorative plaque that adorns it in the ark—as well as a Jewish marriage certificate. All are from the collection of the Jewish Museum of Vienna and were photographed by famed artist Lois Lammerhuber. The photographer Florian Voggeneder from Linz visited the new Linz synagogue and photographed the Bima, the Rimonim, the Shofar and the Toramantel.

Credits

Dr. Danielle Spera (Director of the Jewish Museum Wien), Dr. Anna Mitgutsch (author and board member of the Jewish Community Linz), Gerfried Stocker (Artistic Manager Ars Electronica Linz GmbH), DI René Mathe (architecture graduate, University of Vienna), DI Herbert Peter and Prof. Bob Martens (architects and specialists in virtual reconstruction) and Lois Lammerhuber (photographer) presented the virtual reconstruction of the old Linz Synagogue for the first time at a Deep Space Live special on 15th of November 2016.

Users train in a virtual-reality environment implementing procedures based on the principles of learning psychology and neuroscience—for example, foreign-language vocabulary. The training is imparted ubiquitously—that is, independent of a particular time and space, and personalized.

In Grasping, the second experiment in this series, participants are immersed in a 3D underwater realm in Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center. Test subjects see virtually projected everyday objects and touch them with their hands—that is, they literally grasp them (in both senses of the word). This specific action supports the brain in memorizing the foreign language’s term for the object. This series of experiments is intended to make a long-term contribution to developing learning environments for mobile devices.

Credits

Joint research project by the Ars Electronica Center, Johannes Kepler University Linz, and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan: “Intelligent Machines that Make Humans Learn Foreign Languages”

Johannes Kepler University Linz: Dr. Manuela Macedonia, Michael Holoubek
University of Vienna: Mag. Astrid Elisabeth Lehner, Bakk.
Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan: Dr. Claudia Repetto
Ars Electronica Center: Mag. Erika Jungreithmayr
Ars Electronica Futurelab: Clemens F. Scharfen
Ars Electronica Museum Technology: Thomas Kollmann, Florian Wanninger
Ars Electronica Solutions: DI. Mag. Ali Nikrang, Poorya Piroozan, MSc.