Omniversity of Manchester

3D projection-mapping pro Elliot Woods is coming back to the Omniversity to run vvvv + MapTools again later this year. When we’ve held this course in the past, attendees have come from local digital and creative agencies, from universities – and from as far away as Sweden and Canada!

Here’s Elliot with a few words on what 3D projection mapping is:

“It’s the act of re-projecting a virtual 3D object onto its real world counterpart using a video projector, whereby all the features of the real object which are visible from the point of view of the projector have an image projected onto them, and this image is ‘extracted’ from the corresponding surfaces of the virtual counterpart object. Augmenting the virtual object then results in an implicit augmentation of the real world object.”

Elliot’s now gearing up for hosting his third course at MadLab by releasing a tutorial on createdigitalmotion.com.

We’re still confirming dates as Elliot is working between Manchester and South Korea, but the course is likely to take place in late summer or early autumn. Please take a few seconds to register your interest here and we’ll keep you up-to-date.

And finally, here’s a short video shot during our last vvvv + Map Tools course:

Due to poplar demand, we are running Elliot’s VVVV + Projection Mapping courses again. VVVV is powerful toolkit of media technologies, boasting a glut of built in functionality, tools and examples. You can safely presume that you can get it to interface with almost anything you want, it can generate almost anything you want. There aren’t any other media toolkits that can perform so much ‘out of the box’, having you projecting kinect tracked video onto buildings or controlling robot arms from twitter in days rather than weeks. According to Elliot,

it can usurp all other platforms in terms of development speed, power and flexibility.

VVVV + MapTools : introduction to the tools of projection mapping (2) from Prohyena on Vimeo.

The true power of the tool lies within the elegance within which it makes its features available. VVVV has been used for :

• Long term installations (>3 years runtime)
• Quick installations (<10mins to develop) Vast installations (>50 projectors)
• Deployed installations (>50 units)
• TV shows (The X Factor)
• Hosting websites
• Making my mobile phone ring when the postman arrives if I’m at the cafe downstairs (1 hour development)
• Almost anything

This 2 day course is a hands on ‘by the seat of your pants’ tour of VVVV’s features and how to get started with each bit. But don’t just take our word for it, here’s a testimonial from a past attendee.

I really feel like I’ve learned a proper, brand-new skill. And I’m not done yet! By happy coincidence, I’m already working on a projection piece at work, and after doing this course I’ve switched it up a little and we’ll be projection mapping onto objects instead of a flat surface.

More information and sign up here. Hope to see you there!