Deconstruct Project
The Nissan Innovation Station video
The video is a tour with snippets of recorded information captured on my mobile from the Innovation Station which is located in the O2, on the Greenwich peninsula, South-East London.
All music in video was created by me for the first time using www.soundation.com which is a free programme available online with no need to download.
The Innovation station is a totally free interactive exhibition. The whole exhibition is about Nissan and how they see the future with electric cars.
Google sketch up
The following images were created using Google sketch up 8 which is a free
3-D programme but you have to download it in order to use it. Free download available at http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/download/index.html
this is my second time using the programme as I have used it for a previous project, it is very time consuming but once you get to grips with the angles and buttons it gives great results, you can share your models online and other people can use it example someone may use my model as they maybe constructing inside the O2, the best feature this programme offers is ‘3-D Warehouse’ where you can download people models online e.g. televisions, cars, windows doors the list is endless, so it takes less time constructing your model.
Photos of Innovation Station Deconstruction
Before being greeted by humans we were followed and captured by a human animation before we even step foot in the doors. The idea is simple but effective, on the far left and right of the entrance in the wall, is a USB camera facing out away from the Innovation station, plugged into a flat screen TV which is all set behind glass. The settings on the camera had been sent to blue sepia which gave the blue effect in the photo above and the animation acted like a frame over the moving image. This simplistic idea can be recreated with a web camera but may not have the same fast reaction or high resolution. I will experiment this so watch this space.
Innovation Station Tag Card
Not Actual Size
On entry you are friendly greeted with an innovation tag card, this gives you access to all the interactive exhibits, as you will see in the video some of the exhibits did not work due to technical faults. I have been to the innovation station last year and had noticed since then it had been updated with added exhibits and newer cars which was fantastic. The idea of having your own card to access the exhibits makes the whole experience personal and memorable. When viewing exhibits you scan the bar code on your card this allows you to register your name with the card so each time you scan your card it remembers your name.
When steeping foot into the exhibition you are hit by a calming electric blue field of light, I felt like a deflated balloon floating into another dimension, very calm and opened minded which was a very surreal sensation.White titles glowed into a path to lead on to the first exhibit.
The first exhibit was like stepping foot into a space ship like the star ship enterprise of star trek. Different pitches of voices answering different questions, different faces with different expressions, lots of flat monitors built into the white walls I felt crushed by technology which wasn’t a scary feeling it was interesting. I don’t know how the scene was created but I would have thought all the monitors would be separately wired. When asking my boyfriend who is an qualified electrician and came with me to the exhibition to answer technical questions I may have had about the exhibition he told me that all the monitors would be wired back to a main server which would control the sequence of events that take place on the monitors.
Touch screen technology was a key element throughout the exhibition; you could send yourself emails of images and sounds you had created from the exhibits. The touch screen wasn’t reacting as fast as the first visit I went, this maybe because of wear and tear or because I had got there 15 minutes after the exhibition had opened so not all of the technology had boasted to its full potential.
This exhibit was very inventive. Using your finger as a cursor you was able to look in and around one of Nissan Cars, the Nissan car is recreated as a miniature model which sits on the rounded table behind the clear curved screen. A projected image sits on the curve clear screen and moves as you move with a motion sense bar which lies beneath the clear screen, easy to use once instructed how. This was the centre exhibit surrounded by many other interactive exhibits.
As you can see in the photo, there is a sign disk sticker on the floor saying to stand there, these disk stickers where allocated in most of the exhibits. This disk sticker was an indication to stand on it so you and you only can hear the TV; this was also a simple but effective idea. As you can see in the second photo there is a speaker, with a rounded plastic perspective dome around it, this is so the sound is projected down towards the disk sticker, where you are standing and you can hear a clear crisp sound and this is a good idea because it makes the experience of that particular exhibit more personal, it also does not interrupt the quite technology sound which roams the exhibition. This can also be recreated using a speaker and a plastic mixing bowl it may not have the same crisp effect but I will experiment so watch this space.
PS3 driving simulator was a main attraction for the boys and men. It allowed you to play Gran Turismo driving the Nissan GTR, the white car which was on show in the exhibition. With an all in one car seat, padded steering wheel and pedals, it gave you a virtual experience. You can recreate the experience by buying a gaming chair or using an old seat from a sports car and buying the gaming steering wheel, which comes with pedals and set it up in a realistic format e.g. the same distance between the steering wheel and car chair as it would be in a real car.
Signaged was all round the exhibition at different levels, size and colour. The signage didn’t over take the exhibition as it was your job to check out the exhibits with your card and find out more about Nissan while having fun. I loved the fact that the whole exhibition was interactive and easy to understand the format and layout; every exhibit was no longer than 7 minutes which allowed the traffic flow to be consistent. Also more of the same exhibits where available which stopped waiting time and congestion, there were also activities for more than one person which was a great way for different people to communicate with each other about the experience.
This was one of the last exhibits where a photo is taken with a car and background of your choice and then you send it to your email so that you have a memory of your trip to the innovation station. The only problem is as you can see half the back ground is missing, can this be avoided? Could this be improved? It happened the last time I went to the photo booth and I photo shopped the back ground back into the picture, but what if someone who doesn’t have the technique to do that do? I was thinking of a projection but then it might cover your face and be ruined by shadowing I then thought of a computerised back drop but the same problem with shadowing would occur but it would not look as bad as the current photos it is producing.
Layout of Innovation Station Designed on Illustrator CS5
18/10/2011 The One Show 7:00pm
This caught my interest when i saw it on The One Show, it is a on going project which captures both young and old, performers and non performers to have there time in the spot light. The first thing that came to mind is Land Art? but is it Land Art? or just Art?
