Prof. Aljoscha Smolic

Prof. Aljosa Smolic recently joined Trinity College Dublin as SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies. Funded by a grant from the Science Foundation of Ireland, he is currently building a team of over 20 researchers with focus on V-SENSE - Extending Visual Sensation through Image-based Visual Computing. Besides scientific and technological innovation for creative industries, this will also include creative experiments and demonstrations to showcase and disseminate the results in real artistic products. Before joining Trinity, Prof. Smolic was with Disney Research Zurich as Senior Research Scientist and Head of the Advanced Video Technology group, and with the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz- Institut (HHI), Berlin, also heading a research group as Scientific Project Manager. He has been involved in many national and international research projects, where he conducted research in various fields of video processing and visual computing, and published more than 140 referred papers in these fields. He received the Dipl.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, in 1996, and the Dr.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), in 2001. He is Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Image Processing and served as Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, and other scientific journals. He has been involved in MPEG standardization for 3D video as group leader and one of the Editors of the Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) standard.

Synopsis

Creative Experiments in 6 DoF VR/AR – Beckett, Swift & Trinity 

Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) are among hottest technology trends these days, as they open tremendous new opportunities and may even be disruptive in many areas of business and society. In many aspects technology is mature enough for broad mass adoption. However, creative use for storytelling is still being explored and developed by artists. A distinction can be made between 3DoF (3 degrees of freedom), which provides only look around capabilities (rotation) and 6DoF, which additionally supports moving around in the scenery. While live action 3DoF VR (360 video) has received some attention for storytelling recently, providing live action 6DoF narrative experiences is widely unresolved, for both VR and AR. This talk will briefly outline technology for 6DoF VR/AR content creation recently developed in V-SENSE of Trinity College Dublin as well as related creative experiments. These will include a reinterpretation of Beckett in VR and an experience featuring Jonathan Swift in the context of the old Trinity Library, concluding with an outlook to ongoing productions (dedicated VR narratives and VR opera).