You may have seen the large shiny sphere next to At-Bristol at Bristol’s Harbourside. Well now this houses not only a world class planetarium, but also the UK’s only 3D 4K immersive presentation space, which is connected to a dedicated high performance computer at the University of Bristol.
This means the Data Dome offers a new immersive way of visualising the city and its data (not to mention also offering a fantastic opportunity for cutting-edge projects like interactive gaming). It is connected to the Bristol smart cities project Bristol Is Open.
Time for rights
To celebrate the opening of the Data Dome in Bristol there is a performance of exciting data projects and visualisations tomorrow evening including Time For Rights, an interactive mosaic of videos about the human rights people care most about.
The videos were collected from young people from 12 countries during International Youth Day and stitched together by Tim Kindberg using technology he developed for Nth Screen – an app that allows people to film in sync together from different devices.
As Tim explains: “Time for Rights is the first commission of 1215.today, a project from the University of Lincoln funded by the Arts Council to engage young people around the world about Magna Carta in its 800th anniversary.
“As founder of social video startup Nth Screen, I decided to focus the project on human rights, and to reach young people through a medium that is very much a part of their everyday lives: mobile video.
“The concept behind Time for Rights is for young people to record short videos (6 seconds, a la Vine) about the human rights they care the most about. My goal was to enable collective expression by our youth about the state of their world. I asked them to film at the same time as an act of solidarity – hence the name of the project. The aim was conscious collective action, just as we celebrate new year’s eve together around the world, or observe a collective silence. The time I chose was 12:15pm (Magna Carta was signed in 1215) on International Youth Day, the 12th of August.
“When I saw the videos – about 180 of them from 12 countries – I knew I wanted to create a way of roving around them, and to play sometimes one, sometimes several at a time to create contrast. I decided to make a sphere of the videos, to represent the global nature of the project. I wanted the sphere to be viewable online, so I investigated web technologies and soon found myself deep in WebGL (Three.js to be precise) and HTML5’s Web Audio.”
“I’ve adapted the sphere so that the audience is inside it”
Tim (pictured left) has now used these 180 videos to make an interactive video sphere. As Tim explains: “I’ve adapted the sphere so that the audience is inside it – videos line the sphere’s inside surface, so they cover the Data Dome.
“I added code, of course, to project the sphere without distortion onto the Data Dome’s hemispherical surface. It’s the first time that web technology has been used in the Dome. The sphere spins around the audience, bringing different videos to the front. And there is 3D audio so you can hear the voices all around you. I’ve also made the sphere interactive via a mobile web page.”
You can see the Sphere of Rights in action here:
The Time for Rights project: Tim Kindberg of Nth Screen asked young people
around the world about the human rights they care the most about.
You can experience entering the interactive sphere at the Data Dome event tomorrow. And you can see the latest developments from Tim at the Nth Screen’s website and by following @nthscreen on Twitter. And while you are about it how about following us on Twitter too?
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