Holograms
For my place assignment, I was really inspired by the long exposure photography from various artists that Golan showed us in class. The concept behind my idea for this assignment was to capture a stationary location such as a building in a unique way. Several works shown in class featured people capturing simpler renders of objects such as letters, or the wifi bar graph. I wanted to explore the boundaries of how accurate of a light hologram I could render on a camera. Aside from not even knowing the possibility of this form of photography, some other unknowns I faced were not even knowing what settings to use for this type of photography, how to capture it effectively, and what editing methods to best bring out the picture. After countless failed pictures, the one featured below was probably one of the better ones. It features the layout of the Software Engineering Institute office building located a bit off of Newell Simon Hall.
Some bigger sources of inspiration came from Dentsu London’s Vimeo video:
For the capture, everything sort of presented itself out of convenience (I had to get more tangible goals to get the project done in an effective time frame). I’m currently working on a nonrelated HoloLens project, so I had a decently detailed 3d mesh of the building I worked in. I knew what kind of long exposure photography I could get from simpler lights, such as just rectangle subsections in the Dentsu London’s video or the LED light strips from the wifi strength visualization project. I wanted to explore what kind of resolution I could get from more precise objects, such as a room mesh. Obtaining the mesh wasn’t too bad. Microsoft Hololens has a lot of support for extracting the AR mesh. Next, I imported the room into Blender, which I found a very suitable app to find the room subsections.
I used a blender method called “boolean intersections” where I intersected the object with several thin planes going in both the x and y-direction:
With these subsections, I made an animated gif in both directions:
Which I then imported onto my iPad, and I dragged around space. Overall, the project took me a long time, as this was one of my first projects (lol) that I couldn’t resort to coding, and I had to learn new hardware and photography techniques.
In terms of reflection, I’m quite proud of what kind of photos I obtained, however I know there’s a lot of room for improvement in my handling of the photography. I’ve also learned a great deal about perspective and which angle to take photos of the subsections. I feel like my project successfully conveys the 3d aspects of the room mesh in a unique form of photography. Ideally, I would have liked the images to be more stable and have higher resolution, so that they could look even more accurate.
Results
Side shot from another angle:
Not the cleanest shot ever, but it captured a decent bird’s eye view of the building.
Conclusions and Remarks
In hindsight, I definitely undercut the potential of this project for picking such a commonplace location to map. I should have utilised this capture method on a much more impactful or meaningful location, other than the inside of workplace building. On a brighter note, however, I was quite pleased with how accurate my images ended up turning out. Since I started this project with virutally no knowledge of photography, I felt like I learned alot from this project.
Comments from the Group Review.
A behind-the-scenes video/gif of you “performing” the photo-taking process would be extremely cool/helpful to visualize (for the unfamiliar folk) +1+1
The way you cleaned up the data is impressive. I would like to know more about the hololens to video/gif process.
You’ve put a lot of effort into certain aspects of the craft (e.g. software), but not into others (e.g. visual quality, fidelity, resolution). As a result, the visual aesthetics are weaker than they should be. All of that can be addressed through more iterations and greater care. What concerns me more is the arbitrariness of the subject (some random building), the setting (your bedroom), and the lack of a relationship between them. You missed an important opportunity to create compelling meanings by selecting these more deliberately.
The process is very interesting but sort of glossed over – would love to see more of how you made this happen.
Working more on the long exposure photography aspect could make it more visually understandable. +
Inspired by light-painting with the ipad by Berg, used the long-exposure light painting technique in order to re-visualize the structure of a building. But one of the great successes of the Berg project was the “making-of” video that they made in order to explain the process.
The shape floating in space is hard to perceive. It would have been nice if the light cast onto a real environment, like a table. Where is this photographed?
Why a building? +Why this specific building? +++1+1+1
A diagram of your workflow would have been very helpful. You scanned a building using the hololens? Then you sliced the 3D model of the building, and presented those slices on the iPad, and then did light-painting with the iPad? Correct?
The image is blurry. Could/should have used a tripod during your long-exposure….
How are you editing these photographs? I feel like you could get far more clarity with a couple of sliders. Several of us could show you if you would like!
Nice results – do you have a video? +++1
It also would’ve been super interesting for you to film the process
I want to see how you actually photographed the mesh you made
It seems as though you can get multiple angles of the same thing; could you somehow aggregate that to get a 3d model?
Could you light paint this in different environments? (where the real space is visible and the light paint rendering exists in that space).
How can this image of the building exist in the building itself? Can the context add something to it?
Color could have been utilized in a more interesting/intentional way. ++1
How can you play with the movement of the iPad through space? +++ Moving fast/varying the speed to distort elements of the image? Bending/turning the ipad?
I love the ones that look ghostly, it’s a very cool aesthetic.+1 +1
I enjoy the bottom ones far more as you can’t see the background objects in the bottom 2- more mysterious +
What do the “failures” look like? +1+1
The final documentation looks really good, however I think process shots/videos etc. would add to the project. +1+1
Looks like a letter — maybe you should make some sort of typeface with different buildings haha
The lack of a conceptual aspect was a bit of a shame
Could you have used the level of hand-control you have over the playback technique to distort the building (or a more evocative subject, in which the hand-control would have an interesting effect)
I think there is something poetic with the relationship between the hololens and this hologram of sorts. Maybe expand upon this?+