bringing together a torn community

Professors Steve Bradley, of Visual Arts, and Nicole King, of American Studies, are now working intensly with the IRC on their vision, entitled Mapping Baybrook. Mapping Baybrook uses digital mapping and visualization technologies to convey the history and culture of the Baltimore community referred to as “Baybrook” (the adjacent neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay). The research aims are:

The issues of industrial urban neighborhoods such as Baybrook raise questions about both past and future development strategies in communities throughout the U.S. and around the globe. The history of Baybrook is largely a story of environmental injustice. The industry of a war economy and consumer culture have left pollution, sickness, poverty and crime in their wake. Such problems are too often concentrated in areas that are socio-economically depressed and geographically segregated. Yet, there are positive local stories as well. Telling both challenges the notion that “bad” neighborhoods should be abandoned or ignored and offers the opportunity to envision something better.

Visual, text and sound technologies will make the community’s history accessible online and with mobile devices. Incorporating location, orientation and object recognition technology, digitally augmented experiences will show the past and the present together—revealing the “lost neighborhoods” of Baybrook. The Mapping Baybrook prototype will take spatial, digital humanities programming into new territory, improving upon the best current models.

A conceptual design for the Mapping Baybrook project

It’s (Still) About Time…

In the previous post about the Symphony Interactive currently being developed by the IRC, Wallace mentioned many of the technologies being utilized to pull the prototype off. However, unless I’m mistaken, none of you know what the Symphony Interactive is! In a few words…

Traditional arts institutions such as symphony orchestras are at a crossroads. With attendance down, such organizations are developing new models of sustainable growth that will resonate with contemporary audiences, who increasingly expect multi-faceted, interactive, and user-defined experiences. This is reflected in the myriad of mobile “smart” devices, saturating everyday experience. Such devices provide an opportunity to enhance the experience of attending orchestra concerts by creating multiple streams of information and media through which a performance may be experienced and contextualized. By utilizing these technologies, such institutions can reengage the wider public through contemporary forms.

The Symphony Interactive project will develop software for mobile platforms that will allow users to view scrolling musical scores in real-time, synchronized with a live orchestra by a human time keeper sending pulses via wifi. Utilizing and iPad, users will be able to view portions of the score yet to be played or revisit prior moments of particular interest, as well as access detailed annotations with compositional, historical, and aesthetic information. The “Symphony Interactive” prototype will provide a unique permutation of the traditional concert experience, leveraging mobile technologies in a way that heightens engagement through active participation.

- Eric Smallwood, Technical Director

It’s (All) About Time!
The IRC has spared no time putting me to work on some interesting and challenging projects! I’m currently working on several projects whose topics include multi-class data visualization, interactive tablet apps with sound file driven graphics, dynamic mesh reconstruction, real time pixel painting via the GPU, and synchronizing dynamic gameplay to realtime sound file playback.

Needless-to-say, my summer has been incredibly busy!

For one of these projects, entitled Symphony Interactive, I’m working to create a interactive application that allows an individual to lead an audience of people using tablets through a symphony’s musical notation in real time. Creating the program has involved researching the iOS framework, Apple iPad archetecture, parsing midi files, the accuracy of the midi format, iOS networking, iOS graphics using OpenGL Embeded Systems, iOS GPU programming, and designing appropriate human interfaces to lead large groups of individual users using a tablet. More to come soon!

- Wallace Brown, Computer Science (Intern)

The IRC has teamed up with UMBC in an effort to make seeing our beautiful campus more accessible online. Under the guidance of IRC Director Dan Bailey, undergraduate photography interns Abnet Shiferaw, Daisha Jackson, Jeannine Kilgore, and graduate student Ali Seley have taken large-scale, immensely detailed panoramic images all over UMBC’s campus. These image segments were then painstakingly stitched together and touched up in a program called “Stitcher” by Autodesk. To date, they have completed 28 stunning panoramas, all hosted on the ‘world’s largest 360° panoramic photography community’ 360° Cities. Check out this example of all their hard work:

Click here to go to UMBC’s channel on 360° Cities and view all of the UMBC campus panoramas.

…our talented, hard-working, dysfunctional family
The IRC would like to welcome four new members to our team! Rachel Kreutzinger is our new NASA/Goddard gal. She is a recent UMBC graduate with a degree in computer animation and she is a proverbial ‘whiz’ at Maya. Mark Jarzynski, a recent UMBC Computer Science grad, has taken the very esteemed job of System Administrator. He has some big shoes to fill, but is very capable and we are lucky to have him! Finally, we have two new interns (Muahaha! Fresh meat!). Abnet Shiferaw is a very talented undergraduate photo student, and is currently working hard on panoramic photography with Dan Bailey. The very technically-able Wallace Brown is our new computer programmer on staff, and we look forward to working on some big projects with him!