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Interactive VR view from inside the earth of real-time earthquake data. Current research by Dr. Stefan Marks.
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We invite you to be part of our innovative interdisciplinary research in 2017. Our Creative Technologies Honours, Masters and PhD programmes are open for application. We would love to talk to you about the possibilities of joining us to work on future orientated research projects.
We have several scholarships currently available for both targeted and open research areas at Masters and PhD level. Scholarship applications close December 14th.
If you are thinking about postgraduate study in 2017 please contact us at pgcolab@aut.ac.nz.
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December 5, 2016 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm | AUT City Campus
Pigsty is proud to support the final Auckland Game Developers Meetup for the year. Come along for a tasty sampler of local #AKLgamedev. Join other game developers, programmers, artists, musicians, animators and game enthusiasts to network, share and discuss all aspects of games.
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December 9, 2016 | 4:30pm - 7:00pm
PWC Tower, Level 22, 188 Quay Street
Smarter compliance in the era of Blockchain with guest speaker Daren Seymoor followed by a Panel Discussion.
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Daily until 21 January, 2017
Digital Art Live, Level 2, Aotea Centre
Matter is a virtual reality experience in which you create music. Experiment with instruments and create a musical symphony that comes to life on screen.
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Stefan Marks' video showing a visualisation of what the earthquakes in Kaikoura looked like above and below New Zealand using GNS data made the front pages of the media last week and has clocked up tens of thousands of views on social media.
The work is part of ongoing Sentience Lab research into transforming data into a new, fully immersive and interactive 3D spaces that can be used for multi-sensory visualisation, education, modelling, animation, rapid prototyping and much more.
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Thanks to everyone who attended our annual Bachelor of Creative Technologies Showcase and Awards evening. Check out the Facebook album for highlights that illustrate the diversity of the programme, cutting across the traditional boundaries between creative arts, design, digital media, computing, engineering, and entrepreneurship.
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Scoop, November 17, 2016
Colab lecturer, Dr Maggie Buxton, says New Zealand has a history of social change, activism and reform – from women’s suffrage to same-sex marriage. Maggie spoke at Social Innovation South at AUT South Campus, 10 November.
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Colab hosted its inaugural awards evening on November 11th 2016. The evening provided a great opportunity to celebrate the end of the year at Colab by recognising the success and achievement of our amazing students and their fantastic work.
Award highlights included the Colab Dean's award being presented to Jacques Foottit, the Spark Unleashing Potential Award going to Claudine Nalesu, and the Kraken VR project taking out three big awards: the AUT Co:Starters Entrepreneurship Award, the AR/VR Garage Award, and the Spark New Experiences Award.
Visit the awards page to view a list of all awards, sponsors, and winners. Check out the Facebook album of award winners and their work. A huge thank you to the staff, students, and sponsors who made the event possible.
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Bachelor of Creative Technologies graduate, Harriet Johnson, has been awarded the FDCT Summer studentship to work on the project Textile Investigations: Composite structures and interactive surfaces with Associate Professor Frances Joseph and Miranda Smitheram.
The research programme involves two projects that will advance current AUT research and contribute to academic, creative and commercial research outputs in the area of smart textiles. It will also develop Harriett’s research experience and skills in the construction and testing of textile based sensors, embodied interaction design methods, materials investigation and the construction of composite structures. The summer research assistantship will introduce technical, design, methodological and analytical capabilities that will be of immediate relevance and help for Harriet’s MCT project, which she will commence in March 2017.
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Congratulations to Miranda Smitheram on the successful completion of her PhD, which was examined and passed with flying colours on the 18 November. Her practice-led thesis, titled 'The Hand of the Cloth: An Ontological and Aesthetic Unfolding through Digital and Virtual Materiality' explored textiles through physical, digital and virtual states using generative digital imaging processes and the technology of motion capture. The context of the motion capture environment enabled working in a 3D digital space with physical things. The research gave insights into new methods and approaches for creative research, and contributes to the discourse on new media practices and aesthetics from a different disciplinary perspective, that of fashion. Miranda's PhD was supervised by Colab Director, Associate Professor Frances Joseph and Dr Mandy Smith from the Textiles Department at the School of Art and Design.
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STEVE ROOD'S PRESENTATION - THE SHADOW MACHINE PROJECT
December 15, 2016 | 2:00pm
Colab, WG10, AUT City Campus
Does the photographic still require a photographer, a camera or even a photograph? The Shadow Machine Project seeks to discover new trajectories for the photographic tradition in the age of the algorithmic image.
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Bachelor of Creative Technologies student Claudine Nalesu has been accepted to participate in Venture Up Auckland. Venture Up is the leading entrepreneurship accelerator for New Zealand's young aspiring leaders. Colab is also proud to be hosting the Auckland leg of the programme, helping to keep the curiosity and creativity developing in our studio over summer.
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VISITING PROFESSOR
Prof. Dr. Gregor Lux from the Westfälische Hochschule, Germany, visited Colab from September until November for his sabbatical. Following the invitation of his former Master student, Colab senior lecturer Stefan Marks, he spent the time here rethinking and revising his computer graphics curriculum, forging a collaboration agreement between AUT’s Sentience Lab and his Virtual Reality laboratory in Germany, and finally getting a break from being dean of his institution for 10 years. He gave a talk at the Pigsty symposium (just two days after his arrival), endured virtual holographic creatures on his desk, and had several fruitful discussions, e.g., with Colab staff around teaching at AUT and in Colab in general, and with SECMS staff about computer graphics and virtual reality education in particular.
On the weekends, Stefan and his wife Kathrin took Gregor and his family out to explore the larger surroundings of Auckland. On several trips they were shown New Zealand’s wonders such as crawly inhabitants of caves, remnants of the logging past of Piha, waterfalls, muddy tracks, wild West coast beaches, calm and blue North Shore beaches with Rangitoto as a backdrop, and much more.
After Gregor’s final presentation on the 17th of November, he will now take his family on a five-week round-trip through the North Island (after a very urgent rebooking of the whole trip following the Kaikoura earthquake). A visit by Stefan to the Westfälische Hochschule in 2017 is in preparation.
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King Kapisi and Sima Urale the event with Dr Maggie Buxton
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Joel Umali and Dr Maggie Buxton
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SOCIAL INNOVATION SOUTH
Colab and The Southern Initiative recently partnered together to celebrate Social Innovation in Southern Auckland. The event was an opportunity to reveal details of Colab’s 2017 Master of Social Innovation postgraduate programme.
Dr Maggie Buxton delivered a presentation on the latest trends and issues in social innovation and then revealed details of the new programmes to be run at AUT South in July 2017:
Master of Social Innovation (MSI)
Postgraduate Certificate in Social Innovation (PGCSI)
Postgraduate Diploma in Social Innovation PGDipSI
She was followed by Jane Strange (Director, Auckland Co-Design Lab) and Gael Surgenor (Director, The Southern Initiative) discussing their innovative and impactful collaboration on a number of large scale projects in Southern Auckland.
Joel Umali from The Southern Initiative then hosted a South Style Petcha Kutcha session with inspiring and dynamic presentations from The Roots Collective, Cook Island Development Agency NZ, Oceania Careers Academy, 412 Youth for Youth, Urban Neighbours of Hope, Affirming Works, and ATTEED’s Youth Enterprise finalists.
Anyone interested in discussing the new programmes should contact Dr Buxton at socialinnovation@aut.ac.nz.
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During the first weekend of November, Stefan Marks presented the application of a Virtual Reality painting tool in Arts Therapy at the 2016 Australia New Zealand Art Therapy Association (ANZATA) Symposium in Christchurch.
This project is a collaboration with his partner Kathrin, a Counsellor at Family Action and current Master of Arts Therapy student at Whitecliffe.
It appears that the combination of VR technology and Arts Therapy is still unexplored. During the literature review, no related publications were found, despite key researchers in the area of Arts Therapy and Technology calling for an integration of new technology and mediums into the practice for more than 15 years.
The presentation and following workshop was received very positively by all Symposium attendants. Valuable feedback was given to improve the application, and several future research areas were pointed out.
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Ricardo Sosa ran a session at the Tertiary Education Research in New Zealand conference at the University of Otago on 1st Dec. In this session, a robot facilitated a group activity titled “Eliciting creative views of Tertiary Education through speculative future scenarios: Robot O”. In co-authorship with Rebeca Torres and Felipe Cervera from the National University of Singapore, the session consists of the robot presenting a fait accompli as a way to direct creative reasoning about the future role and meaning of higher education. Ricardo and his team of collaborators will seek research funding to continue this work in 2017.
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Frances Joseph, will present a paper entitled ‘Sapient Textiles: Materiality and embodiment’ at the Body of Knowledge Conference being held at the University of California, Irvine from 8-10 December.
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Clinton Watkins is off to Taiwan to develop links regarding sound spatialisation with the French Sound Lab IRCAM and present at the IRCAM workshop hors les murs 14 -16 December at Kainan University.
Rather than doing a typical presentation, Clinton is performing his new work titled Invisible Narratives that is the result of research conducted in China as outlined in the abstract below:
The Invisible Narratives presentation is a 15-20 minute live sound performance that utilizes a specialized modular synthesizer system, midi interface and associated sequencing software.The focus of Invisible Narratives is upon creating narratives that are purely sonic and imageless, utilizing field recordings captured between 2012-2016 from various international locations within China, New Zealand, Australia, Europe and America. Clinton will utilize the collected sound in application with his newly established composition techniques, customized electronic hardware and software for the production of compositions and performances that focus upon the macrocosm of a particular location. The purpose of the performance is to evoke a visceral sense of isolation within another environment via new sound technologies.
The images provide a visual sense of the type of environments where sound has been collected and will be used in the performance. However, as the imagery itself goes against the notion of concept of invisibility, they've been included as a reference and the performance itself will be dark and doomy and seeks to evoke a sense of place sonically.
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To celebrate our new Social Innovation Hub we are inviting submissions to be published on either the Social Innovation Hub website or The Journal of Creative Technologies on the topic of social innovation. Submissions can be in the format of a blog post, video or journal article. Topics may include:
- Stories of practice / case studies
- Research projects
- Literature / contextual review
- Musings / opinions / explorations
View the Social Innovation Call page for more information.
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Story Edge brings together storytellers, designers, creative technologists and producers to collaborate on transformative, immersive stories told across interactive digital platforms. Showcase your interactive digital project to a new audience at the Story Edge World Exhibition. Submissions are now open to showcase innovative interactive digital storytelling projects. Applications close on 20 January 2017.
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