DMY International Design Festival Berlin, 9 to 13 June 2010
swissnex San Francisco, 12 to 25 November 2009
EPFL+ECAL Lab, 6 to 30 October 2009

 

Animations emerging from an old book on the Swiss countryside... Banknotes which prove strangely seductive... Your head is in a cloud and your clothes ooze bubbles to take you to cartoon-land... Our immediate environment and our daily lives are thus enriched with stories, express new values, give rise to dreams and messages. The Give Me More exhibition presents six installations to experiment this universe combining the real and the virtual. The set-ups demonstrate how Augmented Reality can alter how we perceive objects, bodies and living space and how AR is able to enrich these everyday things with implied references, tales and emotions.
 

Give Me More is the first exhibition in a project which will develop in the coming months. True to the mission of the EPFL+ECAL Lab, it is a milestone in the development of Augmented Reality in that it initiates a new relationship between design and technology. Indeed, the research performed by the EPFL Computer Vision Laboratory has made it possible to develop AR software which offers the end-user an almost magical experience:  the high-performance mathematical formulae used serve to eliminate almost all technical signs, marks and references which you can normally see in such installations. They also serve to increase the set-up's reliability and speed. For the user, technology fades away to reveal the full extent of the universe created by the designers. This effect is further strengthened by a consistency between actual objects and the graphic design of the virtual animations arising from them. The team of designers from Ecal has managed to transcend the technology to turn it into a fully-fledged new medium, rich with new meaning.

 

Give Me More is made up of set-ups which have met with major international success in recent months, as well as totally new experiments - presented as a world premiere - which will be further developed. In particular, the exhibition will feature the Monde des Montagnes, an Ecal diploma work awarded the Pierre Bergé prize for best European design diploma in 2008 and displayed at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris as well as in SantralIstanbul in Istanbul. The exhibition also features Cashback, previewed at the Milan Fair this spring. Give Me More will then embark on an international tour, with a first stop in San Francisco in late 2009.

 

Production : EPFL+ECAL Lab, Nicolas Henchoz
Designers (Ecal & EPFL+ECAL Lab): Camille Scherrer, Vincent Jacquier, Alain Bellet, Angelo Benedetto, Florian Pittet.
Technology (EPFL CVLab): Prof. Pascal Fua, Julien Pilet, Vincent Lepetit.
Project Engineer: Fanny Riedo
Exhibition Design: Nicolas Lemoigne
Graphic Design: Emmanuel Crivelli

Administration & contact: anne.viscolo@epfl.ch