The Value Lab Asia is a collaborative, digitally augmented environment for a wide range of applications, such as participatory urban planning and design, stakeholder communication, information visualisation and discovery, remote teaching and conferencing. It includes a 33 megapixel video wall, three large displays with touch overlays, a number of smaller, mobile multi-touch enabled displays, and extensive video conferencing capabilities. The Value Lab Asia is the younger sibling of the Value Lab Zurich, built at ETH Zurich’s ScienceCity by Gerhard Schmitt, Remo Burkhard, Jan Halatsch and Antje Kunze of the Chair of Information Architecture in 2007/08. It therefore borrows many of the concepts of the Value Lab Zurich, such as being set in a friendly environment that operates in daylight conditions, however comes with updated state-of-the-art hardware and a different look.

The Value Lab Asia was conceived in the second half of 2011, and built in only two months from January 2012 to March 2012. It has been in regular operation since then. We are currently working on a more extensive documentation. Below you find the basic technical specifications.

If you are interested in visiting and/or using the facility, please feel free to contact me at arisona@arch.ethz.ch

Brief Technical Specifications

• Video wall, 4.9 x 2.7m, running at native 7680 x 4320 resolution (roughly 33 megapixels), driven from a single machine. Therefore, most applications run out of the box.
• Display wall with three 82" multi-touch displays, also driven from a single machine.
• Several 40" mobile multi-touch units, including mini-PC, thus completely autonomous.
• Tandberg-based video conferencing with one fixed and one mobile camera. Can be flexibly configured to run on video wall as well as display wall.
• Integrated video recording and production.

Institution: ETH Zurich’s Future Cities Laboratory
Location: Singapore
Period: Since 2011
Project lead, concept, system specification: Stefan Arisona
Interior design: Stefan Arisona in collaboration with Plasmadesign
System integration: PAVE System Pte Ltd

‘robot_mixeur’ is my alter ego when performing as visualist and DJ. As a DJ, I usually mix elements from minimal techno, tech house and techno into driving soundscapes and pushing beats. As a visualist (or VJ), I am using the self-coded software Soundium/Decklight as performance environment for live video editing and 3D content generation.

Numerous performances at around the globe include Zouk Singapore (DJ Mag World Top 5 in 2012), Shanghai’s legendary Shelter, Zurich’s EWZ, Victoria’s Open Space, or Chicago’s Conway Centre. Below is a short excerpt from a DJ / Visuals performance at the Art Stage Singapore opening party at Zouk’s Velvet Underground in January 2012.

https://youtu.be/JRu6M4ycULg

https://www.mixcloud.com/robot_mixeur/poursuite-du-bonheur/

https://www.mixcloud.com/robot_mixeur/shadows-live-at-shelter-shanghai-2008/

Various DJ sets, photos and more videos are available at Steve Gibson’s EPI site.

Pascal Müller, Stefan Arisona, Simon Schubiger, Matthias Specht, since 2001

Corebounce is a collective of artists and scientists with the common goal of mediating between arts, science, and technology. We maintain a number of new media projects and our own multimedia software research platform, Soundium. We are organised as a non-profit association and collaborate with a number of partners from education, in particular with ETH Zürich, and industry.

We regularly tour as the Scheinwerfer Live Visuals Collective, where we create the visual experience at various electronic music events since 2001. Our live-composited and sound-driven visuals are designed to emphasise the theme of the event as well as taking into account the architectural framework. Not coincidentally, we have been labelled as “Club Scientists”: As stated above, our performances are deeply influenced by the momentary state of the Soundium research software platform. At the same time research is typically induced by specfic artistic performance goals.

Scheinwerfer has performed at some of the coolest locations around the globe, supporting world-class DJs and musicians like Jeff Mills, Rush, Miss Kittin, Dave Clarke, Josh Wink, Mouse on Marks, Jimi Tenor and many more.

Steve Gibson and Stefan Arisona, since 2011

Virtual VJ takes the concept of Virtual DJ one step further and unites the role of the DJ and VJ into one interface: 3D space. The concept of Virtual VJ is to allow two or more users to control different aspects of the sound and video environment with their movements. One tracker is set to trigger sound and video and the other is set to manipulate the sound and video initiated by the first tracker. The focus of the media integration is on the development of observable connections between the audio and video mediums in order to assist the users with ease of interaction.

The key conceptual idea that is explored in Virtual VJ is the idea of cooperation and the sense of personal space in ephemeral, virtual systems. This is achieved by programming the trackers so that dramatic events happen when the two trackers are close together or far apart. For example the environment has been programmed so that the trackers apply distortion to the audio when they are proximate to each other. At the same time video effects are added when the same proximity of the two trackers is observed.

This can result in a game of cat and mouse where the users determine whether they will chose to closely follow the movements of the other participant or decide whether they wish to pursue a more individual experience. Audience members are allowed to interact in whatever manner they chose, but at the same time noticeable results will be produced as they inhabit similar spaces, encouraging them to cooperate with each in order to produce dramatic audio-visual results.

Documentation and videos at the VirtualVJ site: https://www.telebody.ws/VirtualDJ/virtualvj/virtualvj.html

3D tracking, sound, and programming: Steve Gibson
Visuals and programming: Stefan Arisona

History

• November 2011 - Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, Scotland. Invited Exhibition
• August 2011 - Jade Valley Winery, Xi’an, China. Invited Exhibition
• July 2011 - The Interactive Experience, HCI 2011, Culture Lab, Newcastle University. Refereed exhibition
• May 2011 - Culture Lab CHI party, Intersections Digital Studio, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. Refereed exhibition

Agent based simulation tools such as MATSim and MITSIM allow us to achieve efficient and accurate predictions of crowd behavior, thereby increasing our understanding of urban systems and assist in urban planning. However, output produced by such simulation platforms are difficult to communicate to stakeholders such as government agencies and the general public due to their technical nature.

In Project Metrobuzz we present a novel and visually striking method of displaying and interacting with large amounts of simulation data in a way that is both scientifically interesting as well as understandable for a broader audience. In order to achieve this, we generalised trip origin-destination information in terms of series of line segments in 3D space that allow spatiotemporal queries to quickly retrieve relevant data. In addition, we implemented interactive tools running on mobile devices (e.g. tablets) to define such queries in an intuitive manner.

W. Zeng, C. Zhong, A. Anwar, S. Arisona, and I. V. McLoughlin. 2012. MetroBuzz: Interactive 3D Visualization of Spatiotemporal Data. International Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICCIS), Kuala Lumpur, Turkey, June 12 – 14.

Project: Ongoing research, software prototype.
Institution: ETH Zurich’s Future Cities Laboratory
Location: Singapore
Period: Since 2011
Concept and programming: Stefan Arisona (ETH Zurich)
Programming: Zeng Wei (NTU), Afian Anwar (MIT), Christian Schneider (ETH Zurich)
Acknowledgments: Kay Axhausen and Alex Erath of the Future Cities Laboratory’s Mobility and Transportation group for providing the base data