The Molecule has a new blog post discussing the installation they designed for Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp’s headquarters, unveiled in 2006. The installation projects a large globe onto a wall and allows users to manipulate it to see real-time information about various IAC-owned companies.
Using the program MotionBuilder allowed us to render the globe in real-time, as well as respond to external triggers. While MotionBuilder is generally used for motion capture it was a good choice for the creation of this installation because of its ability to receive information from multiple sources (i.e. the network, the mouse, etc.), and it runs a real-time node based math and animation engine called relations. In the final design there are multiple shading layers involved, including a land layer, 2 light layers. a haze layer and cloud layers. The “twinkling light shader” used was written in an open GL shading language (CgFX) which created a cool real-time effect that’s not possible out of the box.
via Everything looks better after The Molecule: Spinning Interactivity.
