After the success of Cabinet at last year’s Innovation Playground we, Aldo Hoeben and Ianus Keller, teamed up once again to show our Panamorphosis Table. On the Panamorphosis Table people — yes, this can be more than one — can experience another environment through a mirrored panoramic projection. I will not go too deep into the Panamorphosis Table itself, hopefully Aldo or the two of us together will write up a longer piece on it elsewhere (1, 2, 3).
We first presented the Panamorphosis Table at BrightLive, but in the last year we have been working on improving the quality of the display, resizing the physical table to get it more socially acceptable, shooting better content and making the table slightly interactive by rotating the image. Best of all, the improvements do not interfere with the core values of the table: providing a social setting for informal discussions, using the panamorphic image as a medium for conversation and having a lightweight immersive experience (just a taste).
The Innovation Playground event itself is part of the inspiration week, which tries to bring together professionals from different fields and expose them to innovations from even more diverse backgrounds. On this day, we served as inspiration provider for the audience which was trying to creatively solve problems assigned to them. To make it even more diverse this year the audience also included opinionkids and elderly. The best way to experience the atmosphere and crowd is to view the tour in the panoramic video as shot by Aldo. Hey, you can even build your own mini Panamorphosis Table if you have a small cylindrical reflective object.
The Panamorphosis Table worked great, especially for ourselves; the experience and videos never seem to bore us. The elderly were most pleased with the concept and even provided us with some nice ideas for applications — the ultimate coffee table, a more social Storytable. As a nice bonus Aldo also gave some demos of the accelerometered panorama on his TabletPC. These demonstrations are real eyecatchers and will also be featured at BrightLive 2007 on April 4 and 5, 2008, in the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.
More photos can be seen on flickr, some videos over on vimeo. Also I found another writeup from the visualizer’s perspective over at JAM.
