A panoramic school project

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A linear panorama of Linz as a school project with unusual dimensions

50 to 65 square meters of floor space – the dimensions of an average classroom in Austria are sometimes a little bit too small for school projects of this magnitude. Why not use the facilities and infrastructure of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, together with the know-how of its employees? Dejan Markovic, student of the Technical College Traun for Information and Communication Technology, was looking for an appropriate place to present his self-developed linear panorama in an attractive form.

From the classroom to the Deep Space

With its 16 by 9 meters – and therefore 144 square meters – big screen the Deep Space of the Ars Electronica Center was quickly in its short list. DI Anton Mayr, teacher and supervisor of the project, finally came across the workshop “Your Lab“. It allows school classes to use the museum of the future for their research questions individually. “Your Lab is not a closed offer but it develops in consultation with us,” said Andrea Fröhlich from the educational team of the Ars Electronica Center. “Of course, it is available for every school grade but for the writing of a pre-scientific work (VWA) during the upper stages at Austrian schools the museum as a research institution is quite interesting.”

But now back to Dejan Markovic from Traun, a city about a 20 minute drive from Linz away: In keeping with the year’s main topic of the Linz Tourism Association, he has selected the Danube in Linz, more specifically, the two river banks, for his panoramic projections. “Many city residents and tourists enjoy the views of the respective opposite part of the city, but they don’t get an entire view of the two banks,” explains teacher Mayr. The student has therefore travelled to and created more than 100 pictures, which he then manually put together with the help of an image editing program. Each photo had to be edited in the border areas and shot from different locations in order to produce a linear panoramic picture.

One of the challenges for linear panoramas: The church tower stands behind another building at each view, in the panoramic picture it should be visible only once.

1.6 km along the Danube

“Overlapping objects in several pictures provide different views. For example, church towers always appear at another places in several pictures in relation to the foreground. The same applies to mountains in the background, but also to objects such as ships or trees,” as he summarized in his project report. There is also any help of a stitching algorithm, and the work had to be done manually.

The result are two unusual panoramas of the two 1.6-kilometer river banks, which can be viewed upon request by the museum visitors in the Deep Space of the Ars Electronica Center from now on. About 200 hours of work went into the creation of the two panoramic photographs. A trip along with his classmates to the Danube followed in June 2014, for the presentation of his panoramas at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz. Dejan Markovic will maybe submit his work also for the Prix Ars Electronica in the category “u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD“. But now it’s time for a well-deserved summer vacation.

At the Deep Space of the Ars Electronica Center: If the projector in the classroom is not enough…

Teachers and students who are interested in using the the infrastructure of the Ars Electronica Center (“Your Lab“) for their projects can contact the visitor service directly. By e-mail at center@aec.at or just by calling the telephone number: +43.732.7272.51 (MON-FRI 8:30 AM to 4 PM).

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