May 06, 2005
Manipulate Time With Their Hands
In Doug Pray's documentary Scratch, Naut Humon described turntablists as being able to "manipulate time with their hands." Khronos adds space to the mix. SIGGRAPH 2005 paperon Khronos, a video playback system that allows users to scrub video in bizarre ways, temporal and spatial. Too cool.
A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames. The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate "islands of time" as well as "temporal waves" are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that "cuts" the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.
There are some large .mov and .wmv demos (40-70 meg), but if you want something smaller, scroll down the main project page.
Posted by johndan at May 6, 2005 10:47 PM | TrackBack