design brief - Steven Keating's

eal-life
rendering
Through the use of long-exposure photography, this
project aims to develop a new form of animation where
graphics are rendered in real-life, as opposed to
rendered digitally on a screen. Rendering in reality allows
for real-world input, for example from sensors, to display
environmental data typically invisible to the human eye.
For instance, the photograph in the bottom right shows
the magnetic field lines given off by a laptop. This is
achieved through moving a sensor and light source
through a scene and recording the information through
long-exposure photography. As the sensor informs the
light source, hidden fields, such as radio waves, WiFi
fields, and other fields, become visible in these
photographs. Utilizing a 6-axis robotic arm to precisely
move through the scene allows for detailed volumetric
renderings to be generated. In fact, any 3D shape file in
a computer can be rendered in real-life through this
technique, such as seen in the happy face photograph
above. Films can be made through successively still
frames, generating a new animation form which is a
hybrid of both traditional stop animation and modern
computer graphics.
7