Digital Art

"It's Me" is a piece of art from the artist Christophe Cellier that was presented in the framework of the co-productions with Pictanovo, "Expériences Interactives". This one uses the new technologies to create a link with the audience, a connexion, an interface, in order to immerge the spectator in the piece.

In this installation of a new kind, the avatar, on real scale, materialize itself in front of the spectator when he approachs and begins to imitate him in his gestures and emotions. The holographic ghost is acting like an offset reflect of the observator in order to invite him to think deeply about his virtuality and his own relations with the digital world. It takes life in a human-sized hologram display device, a prototype named Opera.

Thanks to this project, we created the IRIS 75, a life sized holographic display for people and artwork projection

"It's Me", the eponym character of this piece of art, is a ghost apparition at human scale that permits the meeting between the digital art and the game of sportsm. He begins the show thanks to the different interactions scenarios, a libary of answers to the actions of the visitors. The writing of the different scenarios is inspired of sports games and/or artistic choregraphy, with a randomness generator to have unique interactions with the visitors.

The 3D artistic holographic video is the body of an immaterial sportman, it becomes « movement » and « life ». It animates itself and reacts in answer to the spectator's stimuli.

To give birth to this digital and interactive installation, the artist had the help of three partners of the north :

• Idées-3-com on the modelisation and the animation of the character
• Télécom Lille 1to capture the movements of the visitor
• Holusion on the realisation of a human-sized hologram to display the character

The display device was entirely developed in partnership with the artist and the producer, Acnot, to host the avatar and all the technologic components to give it its interactive dimension. The observators's movements are captured by an infrared camera, then the image is analyzed and compared to the Télécom Lille 1 team's work. The goal is to get the key behaviors and to translate it in clear and understandable informations for the software that animates the character.

The holograms is totally autonomous since it is including a computer and a compact display device in its structure. With 6,5 ft tall and 8 ft large dimensions, it has needed an adaptation of the holographic system to fit this solution, that was designed for events up to there, in the digital art world.

The technique that were used are very flexible, the set up of the hologram displayer permits to think about much taller tailor-made solutions and the operating system of Holusion can then easily transform them into multifonctions tools, able to support softwares and application to display a hologram.

The success of this prototype encouraged the use of this technology in the creation of a little brother in this product range, the Opera, wich the entry on the market was fixed in the last 2015 trimester.