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Lieven vanVelthoven —The Racing Star“It ain’t fun if it ain’t real time”By Hanna SchraffenbergerWhen I enter Lieven vanVelthoven’s room, the peoplefrom the Efteling have justleft. They are interested in his‘virtual growth’ installation.And they are not the only onesinterested in Lieven’s work. Inthe last year, he has won theJury Award for Best New MediaProduction 2011 of the internationalCinekid Youth MediaFestival as well as the DutchGame Award 2011 for the BestStudent Game. The winningmixed REALITY game ‘Room Racers’has been shown at theDiscovery festival, Mediamatic,the STRP festival and the ZKM inKarlsruhe. His virtual growthinstallation has embellishedthe streets of Amsterdam atnight. Now, he is going to showRoom Racers to me, in his livingroom — where it all started.The room is packed with stuff and on first sightit seems rather chaotic, with a lot of randomthings laying on the floor. There are a fewplants, which probably don’t get enough light,because Lieven likes the dark (that’s when hisprojections look best). It is only when he turnson the beamer, that I realize that his room isactually not chaotic at all. The shoe, magnifyingclass, video games, tape and stapler which coverthe floor are all part of the game.“You create your own race gametracks by placing real stuff on thefloor”Lieven tells me. He hands me a controller andsoon we are racing the little projected carsaround the chocolate spread, marbles, a remotecontrol and a flash light. Trying not to crash thecar into a belt, I tell him what I remember aboutwhen I first met him a few years ago at a MediaTechnology course at Leiden University. Backthen, he was programming a virtual bird, whichwould fly from one room to another, preferringthe room in which it was quiet. Loud and suddensounds would scare the bird away into anotherroom. The course for which he developed it wascalled sound space interaction, and his installationwas solely based on sound. I ask himwhether the virtual bird was his first contactwith Augmented Reality. Lieven laughs.“It’s interesting that you call itAR, as it only uses sound!”Indeed, most of Lieven’s work is based oninteractive projections and plays with visualaugmentations of our real environment. But likethe bird, all of them are interactive and workin real-time. Looking back, the bird was not hisfirst AR work.“My first encounter with AR wasduring our first Media Technologycourse — a visit to the Ars Electronciafestival in 2007 — whereI saw Pablo Valbuena’s AugmentedSculpture. It was amazing. I wasasking myself, can I do somethinglike this but interactive instead?”Armed with a bachelor in technical computerscience from TU Delft and the new found possibilityto bring in his own curiosity and ideas atthe Media Technology Master program at LeidenUniversity, he set out to build his own interactiveprojection based works.30 31