Author: vaughn

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XShot VidCon Gallery

Spring of 2022 I was approached to build out a system for a “digital shooting gallery.” XShot designed and built a booth that would contain two shooting galleries using their foam dart weapons.

A photo of the XShot shooting gallery booth at VidCon 2022. It's mostly white with Xshot branded graphics on the sides and a clear case displaying all of the xshot dart shooters.

The galleries would run simultaneously and groups in the galleries would score points for every target they hit. Scores were only kept for each group (not individuals). Outside of the galleries there was a monitor mounted above that displayed the high scores for groups that came through the galleries that day.

The two galleries had unique designs. Gallery 1 was stylized to feel roughly like an 8bit environment. The monitors were masked to give them unique shapes and the characters on the monitors were 8bit style sprites that would bounce or slide around.

A photograph of the first shooting gallery done in an 8bit style. There were monitors hidden around that displayed 8bit characters. If the player hit the monitor they scored a point for their team.

Gallery 2 was designed like the back alley of a city. The targets were signs or graphics one may see in the big city.

A photograph of the second shooting gallery done in a back alley, city style. There were monitors hidden around that displayed graphics and characters. If the player hit the monitor they scored a point for their team.

Each gallery would take up to 4 players who could choose the style of weapon and shoot constantly for a limited time. The game was started by a host who would hit a hidden button that set the system to start after a brief countdown. Each monitor had a Raspberry Pi attached to the back of it along with a small vibration sensor. The sensor was sensitive enough to detect when the monitor was hit and register the score with a central computer running a scorekeeping app built in Unity. Each Pi was wired into the network so data was reliably sent to the computer. It would have been madness to depend on wifi on a trade show floor. The main computer was also displaying the high scores to a monitor above the booth and two monitors that players could look at upon exit from the galleries.

There were 28 Pis used across the two galleries and the game ran for 3 days, the length of VidCon 2022. Here’s a walk through of the game as it was played:

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Yuri’s Night 2022

A graphic logo of Yuri Gagrin in a space helmet. The logo is for Yuri's Night, the world space party.

Every year a group of space enthusiasts gather to celebrate human kind’s achievments and dreams of existing as a space faring species. In honor of the first human to orbit it’s called Yuri’s Night.

“Yuri’s Night is the World Space Party. Every year on or around April 12th we celebrate all that humanity brings with us as we explore the cosmos: music, art, science, culture, and each other!”

For 2022 we were invited to projection map the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine) that sat in the hangar with the Endeavour orbiter. Working with Z Fame artists we created a variety of looks to play throughout the event. Some were looping environmental looks while others were audio reactive to sync with the music played by the various DJs at the party.

For the signature look for 2022 I created outlines of the various machines that had been carried to orbit by Endeavour with a squiggly outline pattern on the SSME itself. A particle cloud that danced with the music in the room filled out the background. All of the programming was done with Touch Designer which allowed us to play with the graphics live during the event. Take a look at the quick video we put together here:

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GDC: Storytelling Siblings

Hi everybody. If you’re attending GDC this week please join Adam Bezark, Lex Rhodes, and me for our Game Narrative Summit talk, Storytelling Siblings: The Kindred Connection between Games and Theme Parks. We start at 14:40 PDT on Tuesday July 20th and we’ll be in the chat for live Q&A. Hope to see you there!

https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/game-narrative-summit-storytelling-siblings-the-kindred-connection-between-games-and-theme-parks/879502

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Seconds to Last

A photo of Cynthia Minet discussing her sculpture "Seconds to Last" to a group of gallery visitors
A photo of the rhino sculpture fully lit from within.
A photo of the rhino sculpture lit from within half way through the lighting sequence.
A photo of the rhino sculpture with its internal lights off.

In a departure from previous materials, Cynthia Minet used discarded tents to create this life size representation of the nearly extinct Northern White Rhinoceros. In this installation, Seconds to Last, Cynthia wanted to use light to convey the disappearance of these huge beasts.

Due to the volume of the sculpture and in an attempt to avoid hot spots I used LIFX smart bulbs, 7 of them whose colors reference the seven energy chakras, to provide the internal lighting. To program the sequence of the bulbs fading off I installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and set this up like a typical smart home automation. This allowed us to easily program a time of day sequence and let it run during gallery hours but turn off for the night.

A photo of the clay model for the rhino in the foreground and the finished piece in the background
The clay model that Cynthia made with the finished sculpture in the background

Visit Cynthia’s Seconds to Last page for a full description of the work.

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Jacked: Panthera Atrox

Another collaboration with Cynthia Minet. Jacked: Panthera Atrox is the latest of her incredible animal creations built from reclaimed plastic and this time animated with a similar mechanism to a pump jack used to push oil out of the ground. The lioness’ head tilts up and down with the rhythmic movement of the pump arm.

A photo of a sculpture made of reclaimed plastics and LED lights. It's a representation of an extinct lion, Panthera Atrox. The photo shows it on display in the window of the Craft Contemporary museum in Los Angeles.
Panthera Atrox on display at the Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles

I worked with Cynthia to install the LED lighting throughout the sculpture and programmed the colors using an Arduino and the FastLED library. This allowed us to tune each individual LED to the color based on the light’s location within the sculpture.

Jacked was on exhibit at the Craft Contemporary and stood in the window opposite the La Brea tar pits.

3D printed skulls lit from below with projected, animated text beside them

In addition to the Panthera Atrox Cynthia had printed three skulls of animals that have been lost to extinction. We installed mini projectors above the skulls and I animated the text displayed by each skull to slowly disintegrate in After Effects. The text is from Charles Harper Webb’s poem, “The Animals are Leaving”.

For more information on the installation visit Cynthia’s Jacked: Panthera Atrox page.

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Open Studio – Migrations

Friends! As some of you know I’ve been collaborating with Cynthia Minet on her new installation that will soon be opening at the International Museum of Art and Science in McAllen, Texas. If you’re in Los Angeles this Sunday, March 4th from 2p – 5p you can get a sneak peak of the work at Cynthia’s studio here at the Brewery.

A photo of Cynthia in her studio with sculptures of the Roseate Spoonbills made of reclaimed plastics and lit internally with LED light.

I worked with Cynthia on the lighting/audio system design and programming. Each sculpture has about 49 RGB LEDs in it controlled with a Trinket microcontroller. The audio is triggered by motion and powered from a Trinket Pro. If you have questions, you’ll have to come to the studio 🙂

There is more info on the open studio at the Facebook event page. We hope to see you there.

 

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Collaboration

It’s been quiet in my creative world…but not uneventful. Over the last couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of working with Cynthia Minet on her upcoming installation, “Migrations.” Cynthia is an accomplished artist and her creations are constructed from post-consumer plastics and LED lighting. Migrations depicts six Roseate Spoonbills in varying stages of flight. With this sculpture Cynthia hoped to push the lighting a little further than she had in previous work.

There were two goals.

  1. Have greater control over the color and brightness of each LED
  2. Add movement to the sculpture by animating the LEDs
A closeup of an LED behind a magnifying glass with its wires splayed out as I do my best to connect it to another strand of LEDs.

After some initial conversation a third goal popped up. If we’re going to be programming these LEDs could we also add some motion activated audio to immerse the viewer in the world of the spoonbill?

After some testing we settled on the P9813 LED pixels. The plastic casing around the actual LED helps diffuse the light. The fact that the strands run at 5v was an added bonus. 

To program the lights and the motion based audio I knew we were going to use something in the Arduino family. The spoonbills do not have a ton of room inside of them so we opted for a Trinket to run the lighting and a Trinket Pro to run the audio system. Ideally everything would run off of one board but that just wasn’t feasible here. This also cut down on the cost for each sculpture. 

The next few posts will get into the details of the wiring, programming, testing, and installation of the lighting and audio systems. 

If you’re around this weekend (Oct 21 and 22) you can see the sculpture in its current state at the Brewery Art Walk. Art Walk runs from 11a-6p both days. 

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AR…MR…XR

It’s been a busy spring for Augmented Reality and the last week really topped it off. The 8th annual Augmented World Expo was 3 days of vendors, developers and enthusiastic end-users coming together to talk about, demo and try on the latest AR gear. If there is to be one thing I came away with from the expo it’s that we haven’t yet agreed what to call this thing. Augmented, Mixed or eXtended Reality. Each was used almost interchangeably. It won’t matter what we call if but it sure would help the messaging if we stuck to a naming convention.

The Promise

Trying on Daqri Glasses
Looking Through DAQRI’s Glasses

We all want the same thing. We want a device (or set of devices) that we can look through which will overlay information and interactive elements onto the real world. This information will be easy to access and quickly available. Creating objects and information for AR will be simple, requiring little to no programming. The hardware will be priced in the same range as a smart phone and weigh less. It will be personalized to us and allow access to our virtual assistant of choice.

The Near Future

AR Timeline So FarThis coming year is going to feel a bit like 2016 did for VR. We’re on the cusp of some interesting hardware hitting the market at attainable prices. The big, big players are making moves…Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are all in varying stages of their AR strategies.

Google announced Google Lens at I/O in May and, assuming it works as well as it demoed, looks to be a key piece of their AR strategy. It plays to their strengths in machine learning and information management. Their continued development of Tango will make AR creation and experiences more accessible. I’d like to see Tango built into the Pixel 2 (hint, hint Google) and any other devices they make from here on out. With a likely hardware announcement in the fall, what more will come this year? Time will tell…

Microsoft released its Windows Creators Update for Windows 10. This update includes tools for the creation of Mixed Reality content. Microsoft is trying to make it as easy as possible to build content for AR (and VR) with tools provided in the OS. An interesting side note, Lorraine Bardeen (General Manager, Windows and HoloLens Experiences) used the term mixed reality exclusively in her talk at AWE. Microsoft has since announced hardware from partners Dell and Asus. We’ll see what else turns up this year…time will tell…

Facebook made it clear that AR is a priority at F8. They promise to provide a platform to create AR experiences with relative ease. It’s still unclear what exactly Facebook’s AR Studio will mean for all of us. Time will tell…

Apple announced, just yesterday, their ARKit at WWDC as a platform for bringing solid AR content to iOS. We’ll see what’s truly possible and hopefully see some hints for what’s to come as developers get their hands on it. Time will tell…

Magic Leap…(this space intentionally left blank)

The Reality

Daqri HelmetThe hardware is clunky, uncomfortable, and heavy. The experiences are neat but less than amazing. It’s ok, it’s early days. There are definite use cases for AR as it exists right now. Head mounted displays are great for industrial design, construction and manufacturing. Environments where having information available while keeping your hands free. The hardware is rugged and includes safety features necessary for those sectors.

Entertainment companies can start thinking about AR for project planning and previz. AR and VR are great ways to show a client what your project is really going to look like. ODG (Osterhaut Design Group) has a pair of glasses coming this fall for under the $1000 mark. This will make head mounted AR hardware accessible to small and medium design studios.

For everyone else, my hope is that we can break through the “3D graphics in our world” demos and applications and really start exploring what AR is and what it can be. Let’s settle on Extended Reality as the common term. Our reality should be extended in all possible ways. Not just looking through our phones at cute animations. We posses a ton of data about the world around us and this data should be accessible to everyone in a variety of forms. Whether we hold the phone up to look through the camera, use a head mounted display or wear smart clothing that tug at us when we’re near areas of interest. Existing displays in public spaces should detect our presence and provide information that’s important to us (and yes, there will probably be ads too).

We’re at the beginning of whatever this becomes. With the right mix of vision, open standards and acceptance we can enhance our everyday lives, be more productive and spend less time looking down at a glowing rectangle. We must be patient and work through the hype cycles and the low points to get to the good stuff. I’m looking forward to it…

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Thanks for Artwalking

Friends, family and totla strangers. Thanks so much for coming to thespring  Brewery Artwalk. Hopefully you experienced some art that spoke to you…or at the very least whispered in your general direction. I appreciate everyone that comes by to support all of us here at the Brewery. Hopefully we’ll see you again in the fall. Dates will be announced shortly. If you didn’t get a chance to visit I’ll have my newer stuff up on art.vaughnhannon.com soon. Thanks again.

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PaGoda

There have been many, many trips to Burning Man and many, many plans to create something or other to display in the middle of the desert. As it goes time disappears and distractions mount. Participating in our theme camp was the primary focus for a long time. This year, at the last minute, I managed to pull together a little art project that would sit as a monument to my current obsession with the game of Go (igo, wei qi or baduk depending on your country of origin). The game originated in China some thousands of years ago and was nurtured and modernized by Japan. This structure was to be a nod to the Chinese and Japanese style of architecture without attempting to mimic any one structure specifically.

The plans had been rolling around in my head. I wanted to minimize the use of any screws or nails and make it as transportable as possible. I mocked up a little model in 3D and then set to figuring out the details…some of which didn’t emerge until actual construction.

Here it is, mostly finished. I did add four hanging pieces of fabric in the entryways to add contrast and motion.

Nearly complete less a few additional details.
Nearly complete less a few additional details.

There is more to do and I plan on finishing some of the details I had planned but did not have time to complete. I’ll also modify the structure a bit so it can live out on the open playa next year should I be accepted and placed by the Artery of Black Rock City.

Feel free to check our more photos in the PaGoda Album.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my friend Jeff for assistance in the planning and producing of this project…thank you sir. And, of course, Becky for the encouragement and support in the sometimes crazy things I try to do. Thanks dear.