The Shimmer Wall is located in the link between the two buildings of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. A place of contemplation designed by James Carpenter Design, the wall projects the subtle shimmering light as the sun plays with the Hudson River.

Kinecity have designed the camera recognition system that recognizes the shimmer on the water. Moving and zooming throughout the day on a very slow orbit, the artificial intelligence system tracks the beauty of light reflecting off water, through which on occasion a ferry or yacht passes by.

Client: Museum of Jewish Heritage
Artist: James Carpenter Design Assoc.
Leds: Ledeffects

The Podium Light Wall is located on the South and North facades of 7 World Trade Center. As people wander on the pavement below a strip of blue light gracefully follows them. This strip of blue light is 7 floors tall and is visible from Freedom Park. The Podium Wall accentuates the individual, and the patterns that are created as many pass by together. Kinecity designed the interactive element of the design for James Carpenter Design Assoc. who were the responsible for the wall as an art piece.

Sequence showing the light following a pedestrian below.

Architects : Skidmore, Owings & Merril Llp
Artist: James Carpenter Design Assoc.
Lighting Design: Cline Bettridge Bernstein Lighting Design
Interactive System: Kinecity Llc
LED system: LED Effects

The UMMA Dialogtable is a dynamic new interactive storytelling and social learning tool located at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

The Dialogtable won the GOLD for the 2010 Muse Awards in Media & Technology for Interactive Kiosks.

A multi-user interface enables several people to:

• Watch movies about works of art, artists and ideas found in UMMA’s galleries.
• Discover connections among works from different time periods and places around the world.
• Create their own collection of favorite objects through semantic relationships between the works. This collection, or ‘pool’, is saved to the web so that people can discover more at home.
• Find the location and other basic information about works on view in the museum.

Dialogtable at UMMA

More about the graphics for the UMMA Dialogtable…

Client : University of Michigan Museum of Art
Multimedia Production : Night Kitchen Interactive

Marek Walczak is an artist and architect whose work focuses on people’s participation in physical and virtual spaces. This has led to projects such as Apartment which was shown at the Whitney Museum and many venues worldwide. Dialog Table has recently been completed for the Walker Art Center, it is a shared interface that replaces a keyboard and mouse with gesture recognition technology. Current projects include a one block long façade at 7 World Trade Center that reacts to pedestrians walking beneath it (for James Carpenter Design Assoc.) and interactive video installations such as Third Person, recently shown at the ICA, London. Marek trained as an architect at the Architectural Assoc. in London and Cooper Union in New York.
someprojects.info
walczakheiss.com

Jakub Segen conducts independent research and consults in the area of computer vision, imaging and human-computer interfaces. Dr. Segen has spent 21 years at Bell Laboratories Research, where he led research and development in computer vision and its applications to human-computer interfaces. His recent contributions involve real-time recognition of hand gestures, gesture controlled animated humans and video-based analysis of human motion. His research contributions also include fields of computer graphics, pattern recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, image compression, signal analysis, information theory, and bio-engineering. He holds a doctorate in Electrical and Bio-engineering from the Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Segen holds ten patents, with four more in process, and more than 60 publications.

Wesley Heiss’s is a visual artist and designer whose work explores humanities relationship with technology. Besides the collaborative commissioned work with Kinecity his installations and sculptures have been shown across the US including the Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection in Houston, Brooklyn Academy of Music in NY, and Arthouse in Austin. His artistic practice has earned him many awards including the Artadia grant, the Dallas Museum of Art Kimbrough Grant and residencies at both the MacDowell Colony and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. Wesley received a Master of Architecture from Rice University in Houston, Texas and a BA from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. He is currently a Professor of Practice at Lehigh University where he heads the Product Design concentration.
wesheiss.com
walczakheiss.com

Johanna Kindvall is a designer with a background in social work. In May 2003 Johanna got a grant from the Arts Grants Committee in Sweden to work with Marek Walczak in New York City on digital interaction. She have been working with Marek Walczak and Kinecity ever since on a wide range of interactive projects. Between 2004 and 2005 Johanna also worked for James Carpenter Design, New York City, working on graphics, presentations and project development.
johannak.com

The Ethics Table is a multi-user game for young teens and up. The table is the center of the “Ethics” exhibition at the new Newseum in Washington DC. Two teams spontaneously play a simple question and answer game that addresses the complex questions journalists face every day. Using camera recognition technology, people can use any gesture to collect questions and answer them as speedily as possible.

More about the graphics for the Ethics Table…

Client : Newseum
Exhibition construction :  Kubik