ualberta – Joel Adria

Micro PCs in the theatre

This year as my final project towards my degree in Technical Theatre, I chose to examine how Micro PCs and other embedded technologies can be used in the theatre.

The final report ended up being a general survey of these compact technologies, rather than a specific case study. It summarizes many different experiments I’ve played with in the past year, and hypothesizes how technologies might be used in a proposed production of R.U.R at the U of A. (Stay tuned, this production may come to life this fall!)

Be sure to check out the PDF Download of my report. You may find some ideas of your own to experiment with! I look forward to trying out some of these techniques on productions in the future.

Download 577 Research Paper

HUB Mall LED Lighting Competition

Back in March I helped out and participated in the HUB Mall Lighting Design competition, organized by Mel Geary.

The goal of the competition was to encourage experimentation with the new ETC Ion lighting console purchased for the FAB Media Room, while also allowing students to explore moving light fixtures, lighting pre-viz using ESP Vision, experiment with possibilities of the HUB Mall LED lighting rig, and of course to spur a bit of department competition!

My design was a series of chase effects programmed as step cues on the ETC Ion, all fired through QLab using Midi Show Control, timed to the music video, I Love Cats by schmoyoho. I also built the entire show exclusively using the off-line editor.

The winning design by first year BFA Theatre Designers Camille Maltais and Cheyenne Sykes earned them a free 1-year license of ESP Vision.

Overall it was a great experience, and plenty of HUB Mall residents poked their heads out to check out the shows. Typically the LEDs installed are operated at less than half their potential output, so the full-intensity fixtures were quite dramatic. We did have a few issues with some fixtures not responding correctly over DMX, probably due to the length of the runs and speed of data changes used. The wireless DMX transmitters/receivers we used to link our control station and the projection/I-Cue station setup mid-mall worked well though.

Check out the video Mel produced, or some of the photos I shot during the event, below.

HUB Mall LED Lighting Competition, a set on Flickr.

Wave Launch

Wave Launch, a set on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
The Wave Art & Media Installation was launched on Thursday June 23, 2011 as part of the McLuhan Centenary and the Media Ecology Convention 2011 in Edmonton Alberta.

Wave was unveiled in the atrium of Enterprise Square (old Bay building in Downtown Edmonton, owned by U of A). Several convention attendees and students of the MACT program, along with friends and colleagues attended the launch and tried their hand at being a “waveling.”

Wavelings can connect via their smartphones, tablets, or traditional computers to a special web app, which allows them to explore webcams from all over the world, based on the McLuhan concept, “the global village.”

They can also view their image as a silhouette amongst a series of “renga” poetry written for Wave. This interaction explores McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.”

The Wave will be in Enterprise Square until November 2011, and will be continually updated and developed with software and hardware updates though out its stay. Stay tuned to the @wave_art twitter page for the latest news.

Thanks to Jeremy Keay for shooting the photos.

TV Wall on display at EIA

As part of the McLuhan Centenary 2011, the Vintage TV Wall is now on display in the departures area at Edmonton’s International Airport. The Wall plays back a variety of clips from McLuhan’s legacy, encouraging patrons to reflect on his well-known themes of “the medium is the message” and “the global village”.

Originally put together to promote the final Wave installation, the TV wall was shown at the Cool Media event at the Art Gallery of Alberta. TVs and equipment were contributed from Kevin Lau’s personal collection, and content and design were my responsibility. The display case created for the airport was put together by Cezary Gajewski, an industrial designer at the University of Alberta.

The display is in the domestic departures area past security, so you’ll need to take a flight sometime between now and November. After that it will be viewable in Enterprise Square downtown until January, alongside the final Wave installation.

Be sure to check out the Flickr set I’ve posted of the entire process, along with a video or two on the YouTube channel.

Wave II underway

Remember the McLuhan TV Wall? That was part of a larger interactive installation project that is now making its way out to the Edmonton International Airport. More on that soon, but more to the point: Wave II (TV Wall was Wave I as I liked to call it) is now underway.

Wave is an interactive installation project with the goal of encouraging inter-departmental and inter-disciplinary involvement, as well as to celebrate the centennial of Marshall McLuhan‘s birth, a Canadian communication scholar who was born in Edmonton 100 years ago. The final project will be unveiled on June 23 at noon in the atrium of the Enterprise Square (old Bay building) downtown as part of the Media Ecology Convention 2011.

The final design is still under heavy development, something I’m very excited to be a part of. I’ve been working with Cezary Gajewski in the past few days, setting up our shipment of equipment and new toys in our development lab. Here’s a few images and stats on the project.

Equipment:

1x Mac Pro (8 Core)
1x Mac Mini
1x MacBook Pro (mine)
2x Sharp 60″ LCD TVs
2x Acer monitors
8x KRK Studio Monitors
1x M-Audio ProFire 610 audio interface

University Departments involved: Drama (Tech), MACT/Extension, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Industrial Design, Music, English

Number of alphanumeric displays to be manufactured: 300 (by hand)

Video after the jump.

Upcoming: Portfolio Show 2011

It’s been a quiet time ~~for me~~ on jole.ca the past couple months, but I wanted to let everyone know about an upcoming event at the University featuring work by some of my cohorts as well as a special project I’ve been working on as part of the University of Alberta Portfolio Show & Silent Auction.

Photo Mar 31, 11 48 59 PM — Promo Postcard for Portfolio Show

Portfolio Show is mostly geared towards the BFA Design students that us Techs and SM’s work with throughout our 4 year program, but we will have a few things to showcase as well, and my experiments with the Kinect platform will be incorporate as part of my official title as “Projection Designer” for the show. I’ll be posting about that project soon after the show goes up.

So when and where?

Where:
Second Playing Space
Inside the Timms Centre for the Arts
University of Alberta,
87 Ave & 112 Street

When:
Wine & Cheese Reception
April 6th 7pm-10:30pm

Gallery Open
April 7th 2pm-8pm
April 8th 2pm-8pm
April 9th 2pm-7pm

Silent Auction
April 9th 7pm-10pm

What:
A showcase of Theatre Design work from BFA/MFA designers, with work from BFA Tech and BFA Stage Management from the University of Alberta.

I hope to be around during the opening on April 6th if anyone wants to come by to say hi and talk tech! Hope to see you there! (I’ll post any FB events as they are available)

EDIT: Facebook event here!

McLuhan TV wall installation

If you’ve been following along on my YouTube channel you may have picked up on a few clips of a recent project of mine involving a gigantic pile of old TVs.

The purpose of the installation was to explore Marshall McLuhan‘s theory, “the medium is the message.” A group at the University of Alberta is developing a larger interactive installation entitled “WAVE” to be setup at the Faculty of Extension in celebration of the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth. Our TV Wall was setup, with guidance from the WAVE Group, at a reception to raise awareness about the project.

So what is it exactly? The setup consists of 11 Television from 1960s onward that are tuned to play different channels. In one corner of the room we had an antenna connected to a high-end RF Modulator capable of outputting 3 different video sources on any channel. These three sources were from DVD players all at a different point on a media disc. In short, we setup a trio of our own TV Stations in the lobby of the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the results were pretty spectacular! Most of the TVs were from Kevin‘s personal collection, along with the VHS Reporter Video Camera that was feeding a few of the screens, and a few of them were acquired from a few Facebook call-outs and dumpster diving.

Embedded is a video of the final setup, and clips from its development are available here and here.

Bearbook breaks 4k users, begins FB Ad Campaign

Congratulations Bearbookers, you’ve done it again! Exceeding all our hopes and dreams, we now have well over 4000 installations of Bearbook on Facebook. It’s been great to see the timetable updates roll in from existing users in preparation for Winter semester as well.

Screen shot 2010-12-13 at 10.58.28 AM — Bearbook broke our Goal-o-meter once again!

In other Bearbook news, we’ve been playing around with Facebook Ads for a day or two. I found some free startup credit online, so if you aren’t already a Bearbook user, you might see it show up on your Ad bar.

Yuri has been hard at work bringing Bearbook into iframe world (we love Facebook…), and we hope to push it out in January. Coming up after that will be some great new features, so stay tuned! Hope you had a great semester, and best of luck on all your exams U of A.

Bearbook brings demo back!

After attending Edmonton’s DemoCamp for more than a year now, I was extremely excited to present Bearbook in front of Edmonton’s tech community tonight alongside chief programmer Yuri Sulyma. DemoCamp was one of the main reasons why I really felt motivated to develop Bearbook, in the hopes of someday presenting it alongside the awesome projects that came before me.

Going into tonight, Yuri and I joked that we would be bringing “demo back” by just giving a straight up demo of a project we’d been working on, minus some of the business jargon that seemed to have crept in over the year. (And I quote: “it’s a social media engine!”)

We got an absolutely amazing response both immediately on the twittersphere and afterwards at the meet-up. Here were some of our favorite comments:

@kenbautistaI like these Bearbook guys. Keep it simple, get users.

@kevin_swan I could see Bearbook scaling across tons of universities and colleges if expanded beyond the U of A. 5 Retweets

@BranigansLaw Great presentation on BearBook. Very unique idea, pure tech inspiration, embodiment of #democampyeg

@danaditomaso BearBook app for Facebook is really well done, kudos!

@dserink Bearbook definitely the best demo so far tonight – to me, this really embodies the spirit of #democampyeg

@outinc Ok #UofA students. If you haven’t checked out BearBook on FB, do it. I’m not a student and I want to be on it. #verycool

I also kinda saw this one coming as soon as I started logging into BearTracks…

@outinc Dude’s password is like 25 characters long, the entire room was impressed. #democampyeg

So thanks democampers, it was a really great experience, and it’s a huge encouragement to keep going and develop more projects to share. Hopefully we brought a bit of “demo back” too!

Bearbook.ca Now Online

This morning it occurred to me that Bearbook needed a presence outside of the world of Facebook. We’ll be posting flyers for Bearbook around Campus later this week in our first real ad campaign, and it occurred to me that people might be Googling “Bearbook” in order to find it. Unfortunately Bearbook of the dot com variety is definitely not our product. So I plan to try and take over them with my super awesome SEO skills (ok, not really) and at least make an attempt to Bearbomb them. Thus, I’m proud to introduce Bearbook.ca!

It’s not much right now, but keep in mind I went from domain registration to jQuery all in one day. Be sure to keep Feeding, Tweeting, and Discussing Bearbook, and its mini-promo-website Bearbook.ca!

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