Mixed Reality Installation with visitors as live-projected 3D-avatars.

Gulliver’s Box was a result of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s collaboration with Prof. Hirokazu Kato of Osaka University. With the Futurelab focusing increased attention over the last two years on Mixed Reality applications — including the technology to run them and their potential areas of utilization in artistic and scientific fields — an initial meeting with Kato was held in conjunction with Pixelspaces 2002, where he presented his work at a symposium. Then as well, he offered visitors to the OpenLab Exhibition the opportunity to try out Mixed Reality applications he had developed. Visitors’ positive experiences and reactions and the discussions triggered by the presentation ultimately gave rise to the idea of a joint project.

The developments that had been brought together in this installation represented the effort to pursue new approaches to dealing with Mixed Reality content. The challenge at the core of this project was to position an innovative medium somewhere between theater, film and installation. The result was an infrastructure that offered artists new opportunities to convey audiovisual information, and one that ought to encourage creatives in every discipline to work with these new approaches. Seen from this perspective, the platform that had been created in this way generated an experimental laboratory situation for a broad spectrum of forms of artistic expression. With it, performances by dancers, singers or actors can be recorded, transferred to avatars, and enhanced with any kind of computer animation. The application on display in the Ars Electronica Center also provided visitors with the opportunity to customize recordings of their own actions and subsequently to undertake a very special process of self-reflection.

Gulliver’s Box was further developed into Gulliver’s World, in which visitors were called up to actively design their artificial world and the characters that populate it.