The article touches on the Podium Light Wall made for 7 World Trade Center and the Shimmer Wall, a video wall that represents sunlight shimmering off the Hudson River for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Don’t miss the Dialog Table which makes an appearance at the end of the article.

The article touches on the Podium Light Wall made for 7 World Trade Center and the Shimmer Wall, a video wall that represents sunlight shimmering off the Hudson River for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Don’t miss the Dialog Table which makes an appearance at the end of the article.

Front Desk of Mori Art Center

Mori video signage and gaurd

Video taken from a pedestrian bridge over Omotesando Street.

This is a close up view of the LED wall, you can see it is quite low resolution but very large.

Inside the project continues as a projection of light and image from the ceiling. There are directional speakers playing layers of music and natural sound effects, which i suppose is soothing and condusive to shopping. Both the projection and directional speakers are on motors which allow them to trace a path up and down the malls long stairs creating an effect of water cascading down. The imagery on the interior projections is close up video of the famous trees lining Omotesando Street and nearby rivers. Theatrical lights provide color which changes to reflect the current season. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me take any video of the inside but there are some photos of it on their site. The effect indoors is less spectacular than the outside but it is mesmerizing if your walking down the long stairs.

I imagine the use of interior visuals on the buildings outside and outdoor images inside is supposed to some how merge them through use of media. Which is somewhat ironic since the process of relating inside and outside in the Notion Organize Project has blocked almost all natural light and windows.

From what I gather the system software is MAX/MSP, and there was an impressive team of people involved in the production.

The Omotesando Hills architecture has won more than a few critics as evidenced by this critical essay by Mark Devlin, publisher of Metropolis. You can see some of what his writes about these photos of the neighborhood on Flickr.

Finally a couple notes about sources. Omotesando Hills has a quite presentable English site but their Japanese site is more complete. I made use of Google’s language service for translation of these pages in particular

• Technology: Japanese, English
• Team: Japanese, English
• Images: Japanese, English
• Land Song for Omotesando: Japanese, English, in MP3

This post is an update to one I made on my blog a couple weeks ago, thanks to Keiko for her translating assistance this time.

UPDATE: 4/7/07

I’ve been finding out a bit more about the project. It looks like the company Glamoove (GLMV.jp) was associated with the project. It is featured in the book Japanese Motion Graphic Creators 2007 and there is a video of it on their website and there are some photos in their portfolio.

I should mention the cake was made by Gateaux Inc. of Plymouth MN

The Peace Memorial Museum and the Hall of Atomic Bomb Victims serve two different missions and thus have very different exhibits and feelings which understandably carry through in their approaches to technology. The Peace Memorial Museum uses technology now considered traditional in many museums (audio guides, push button AV, animatronics, creative lighting etc.) to tell stories of people and the city. In contrast The Hall of Atomic Bomb Victims is a venue to research and document the experiences of individual bombing victims. There are dozens of interactive research stations which visitors to search databases audio, video, text, journals, official documents, news reports in many different languages. The stations serve a scholarly research oriented function which is a refreshing change of pace from the high tech edutainment found in many contemporary museums. In fact these study stations have about zero entertainment value on their own but are incredibly useful to the serious researcher and the casual visitor.

When you enter the hall (free admittance) they hand you a brochure and ask you which language you prefer. Extra brochures are available on stands throughout the hall.

You may notice the small barcode on the brochure. Similar to the QR codes seen on ads and in magazines throughout Japan. Unfortunately I didn’t have a phone equipped to read QR codes so I couldn’t find out if there was a phone/internet tie in.

The brochure is inserted into one of the many study stations like this.

The brochure opens the content up in your chosen language.

There are stand up study stations in the lobbies and open areas:

The main lobby has a video wall showing abbreviated records that are also available on the study stations.

Sit down stations are set up for longer more in depth video viewing and reading.

These sit down stations have pages of Japanese text on the table which is translated on the screens above. Visitors can be turn the physical pages which advances the on screen translation or they can use a simple set of buttons on the table. Related audio and video or other documents can be accessed with the buttons.

(I apologize for the poor quality of these photos but I couldn’t find anything better online)

Unfortunately I was left wanting a way to save the research I had done. Possibly onto a webpage accessible through the barcode or other access code on my brochure. Or at the very least a way to search all this content away from the museum in an online format. That said it’s certainly a site worth visiting if your anywhere nearby.

Links:

Hall of Atomic Bomb Victims

Peace Memorial Park

This is my last day in One Groveland but not my last post on the Walker blogs. My colleagues in New Media are going let me keep posting here, but anyone who wants to get in contact with me after today should use my other email (eric AT helveticore.com).

Here is a screenshot of the new front of walkerart.org

and for archival comparisons here is the old one:

UPDATE

For further archival reference I posted a list of links to the homepages of years past on our NMI page.