Ars Electronica

As many people know (Skick excluded - funny story there), Ars Electronica is a huge techie convention that takes place in Linz, Austria every year. They have a museum there now with the same name, chock full of high-tech interactive wonders. This place is like Seattle's Pacific Science Center meets the Smithsonian, but better. There's so much stuff to do inside, I don't know where to start.

Our experience started seconds after we paid for our tickets, when an employee dragged us over to a picture morphing machine. Skick and I sat down, they took our pictures, and the software morphed our faces together to form a couple of seriously hideous (but cool) combinations. Lev's just say thatSkick looks a whole lot better with her own face than with bits of mine thrown in!

We probably spent another half hour on the next exhibit - a beat mixing machine that used light and tactile sensors across a sort of looping timeline. There was a table where you put pieces of different sized and textured material, and a panning sensor slid across, making a beat with a different tone and feel for each one. We made some pretty bumping beats, as well as acacophony of high-pitched noise. Awesome!

The next great one was called something like the "Slot Machine Drawing Machine". This one was an ingenious mix of mathematical art and rhythm. It was a big touch-screen drawing surface, with all the normal computer drawing options - lines, circles, etc. The big difference was that it was on a slot-machine style scrolling loop, so everything that you drew scrolled around on a big loop before appearing again. It really did make the artwork that you created as much a rhythmic music experience as an art one, and was also very analytical and geometrical. Needless to say,Skick was much better at this one than me. She was able to produce some amazing triple helices of gradient color and texture, and I threw in some black and white blobs ;-)

Bz far the most intricate and advanced of the exhibits was called something like "Gulliver's World." I don't think an explanation willappropriately describe just how amazing this system is,but I'll try. There are a number of stations where you could create various parts of your "world" here, each one storing the part on a clear data card like the ones from Minority Report (or pretty much any other cool sci-fi movie.) The first one you made a 3-D rendered figure by building a model from play-do and putting it in a box with a webcam and a rotating base that captured a full circle image of the figure and mapped it out in digital 3-D.

you then took the data card to the next station, where you physically stamped out terrain, objects and your newly-created 3-D figure onto a virtual world surface, a textured half-circle dome. When you were done there, you took your data cards to a video-camera booth, whereSkick and I jumped around and acted goofy in front of the camera for a little while, then grabbed the data card and moved on. Now came the good part - putting it all together. There is a huge surface where you place all the data cards where you want, and a massive screen showing your newly created world in 3-D. One of our final products had an airport, a business park with a big billboard showingSkick and I acting goofy (fully animated), and tractors paving roads. A camera that you could physically move around showed you the city from a bird's eye view on the screen, and if that wasn't enough, there was a separate screen with a real-life scooter attached where you could literally scoot through your new world, and see everything you created in first person 3-D. Even more, slam your fist on the table where you've digitally created the world, and you create an earthquake - all the buildings crumble, your animated billboard cracks, and the roads are destroyed. I'm in the tech industry and all, but I have never seen anything this cool.

There were a ton of other exhibits, but it would take days to describe them, and I'm not even going to try. Well worth a visit, though, and you could easily spend a whole day or two inside.