YOU! The Experience, located in the Museum's Abbott Hall, is one of the first and most comprehensive exhibitions that showcases the connection between the human mind, body and spirit in the 21st century. The 15,000sq.ft exhibit provides a hands-on opportunity to explore and optimize your personal health, fitness and well-being. The 13ft tall Giant Heart is a focal point of the exhibit, and allows guests to see different interior and exterior views of this amazing virtual organ-and it can even beat in time with guest's own pulse.
Ian Macpherson, co-founder and director at 7thSense, offers this overview of the Giant Heart's AV design: "For this project, we used four Delta servers configured in Mesh Mode, into which a custom 3D mesh and movie texture from XVIVO, is read and can be placed in 3D space, exactly where the physical mesh is located in the real world. Virtual projectors are placed around the mesh where the real projectors are located, and the resultant output from the multiple PC cluster is geometrically matched to the real world, so that little additional distortion correction is required. The Delta outputs are soft-edge blended to bring the projected images into a single, seamless image."
A series of four different movies for the external projection surface can be selected by the guest using a touch screen console programmed by BBI. These are a default general anatomical view, blood vessel highlighting, and a special 10-second infarction movie to show what happens during a heart attack. Complementing these are four additional sequences for the internal rear-projection screen, namely default internal structures, blood flow visualisation, valves in operation, and electrical activity.
"Because any of these movies can be selected at any time, we engineered a flexible Sequence Control mechanism which can swap out movies without pausing," explains Macpherson. "Since we are serving a 2200 x 4000 movie from each PC, this is not a simple requirement, but by creating an innovative mechanism of swapping from high-resolution via a low-resolution version, we allow the visitor to see a 'smooth fade' from one movie to another, without pausing."
(Jim Evans)
