Browsing by Author "Duer, Zachary R."

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    Alchemically, an Educational Role-Playing Game
    Freeman, Lucas Jerome (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-29)
    Alchemically is an educational role-playing game that functions as a classroom aid for boosting middle school and high school students' memorization of molecular formulas and molecule's attributes. The game implements several diverse teaching methodologies, including trial and error, practice and feedback, and the presentation of information from audio and visual cues. It also motivates students to continue learning through both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Student players craft molecules by choosing and placing atoms into a crafting table, then bonding them together. To help players build molecules, players can reference a journal that includes images, diagrams, and factual information on the molecules included in the game.
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    The Ashes and the Portal: An immersive stereoscopic experience on Cyclorama
    Liu, Xindi (Virginia Tech, 2019-08-05)
    the Ashes and the Portal is an immersive stereoscopic animated short capturing the burned library after a fire disaster at Mzuzu University, Malawi, Africa, and it also witnesses the new design of the library from Virginia Tech architecture students. This animated short recreates the burned library and presents the new library design with photo-real image sequences which can immersively bring the audiences onto the site. The Ashes and the Portal utilizes the Cyclorama system, which is a 32 feet diameter and 16 feet tall cylindrical screen with four projectors that can display visual content. The surrounding panels with rendered footage could provide an immersive experience within this semi-public space. This is a collaboration project between the School of Visual Arts and the School of Architecture + Design, also with technical support from the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. This project explores the potential use of Cyclorama system as a platform for CG works, especially for stereoscopic animation.
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    The Battle of the Kings
    Gorjian, Mahshid (Virginia Tech, 2019-10-22)
    The work presented in this thesis explores the possibility to integrate 2D drawings with 2.5D animated characters in 2.5D computer graphics. The purpose was to show the effects of the illustrated artistic style and produce an effective emotional and story in motion without realistic animation look. Inspiration for the story comes from a true story based on Iranian history and an epic story that occurred just thousands of years ago. I focused my work on the context of Iran's history.
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    Composing Holochoric Visual Music: Interdisciplinary Matrices
    Rhoades, Michael Jewell (Virginia Tech, 2021-02-01)
    With a lineage originating in the days of silent films, visual music, in its current incarnation, is a relatively recent phenomenon when compared to an historically broad field of creative expression. Today it is a time-based audio/visual territory explored and mined by a handful of visual and musical artists. However, an extensive examination of the literature indicates that few of these composers have delved into the associable areas of merging virtual holography and holophony toward visual music composition. It is posited here that such an approach is extremely rich with novel expressive potential and simultaneously with numerous novel challenges. The goal of this study is, through praxis, to instantiate and document an initial exploration into the implementation of holochory toward the creation of visual music compositions. Obviously, engaging holochoric visual music as a means of artistic expression requires an interdisciplinary pipeline. Certainly, this is demonstrated in merging music and visual art into a cohesive form, which is the basis of visual music composition. However, in this study is revealed another form of interdisciplinarity. A major challenge resides with the development of the means to efficiently render the high-resolution stereoscopic images intrinsic to the animation of virtual holograms. Though rendering is a challenge consistent with creating digital animations in general, here the challenge is further exacerbated by the extensive use of multiple reflections and refractions to create complexity from relatively simple geometric objects. This reveals that, with the level of computational technology currently available, the implementation of high-performance computing is the optimal approach. Unifying such diverse areas as music, visual art, and computer science toward a common artistic medium necessitates a methodological approach in which the interdependency between each facet is recognized and engaged. Ultimately, a quadrilateral reciprocative feedback loop, involving the composer's sensibilities in addition to each of the other facets of the compositional process, must be realized in order to facilitate a cohesive methodology leading toward viability. This dissertation provides documentation of methodologies and ideologies undertaken in an initial foray into creating holochoric visual music compositions. Interlaced matrices of contextualization are intended to disseminate the processes involved in deference to composers who will inevitably follow in the wake of this research. Accomplishing such a goal is a quintessential aspect of practice-based research, through which new knowledge is gained during the act of creating. Rather than formulating theoretical perspectives, it is through the praxis of composing holochoric visual music that the constantly arising challenges are recognized, analyzed, and subsequently addressed and resolved in order to ensure progression in the compositional process. Though measuring the success of the resultant compositions is indeed a subjective endeavor, as is the case with all art, the means by which they are achieved is not. The development of such pipelines and processes, and their implementation in practice, are the basic building blocks of further exploration, discovery, and artistic expression. This is the impetus for this document and for my constantly evolving and progressing trajectory as a scholar, artist, composer, and computer scientist.
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    Creative Code
    Fralin, Scott; Duer, Zachary R. (Virginia Tech, 2018-01-29)
    Visual art exhibit featuring works created by undergraduate students in the course ART 3704, Creative Code, wherein students used the rapid-prototyping programming language Processing1 to create the artworks in this exhibit as part of their major project for the semester. 2018/01/29 - 2018/05/14
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    Down Stream [Appalachia]
    Franusich, David J. (Virginia Tech, 2020-05-06)
    Down Stream [Appalachia] is an immersive, interactive art installation that addresses themes of ecological preservation, conservation, and connectedness—illuminating the precarity of imperiled freshwater species in the Appalachian region. The exhibition is composed of reflective, refractive sculptures and underwater video footage, surrounded by fully-immersive spatial audio. Both the audio and visual elements react to audience presence and proximity. Species highlighted are the Candy Darter (Etheostoma osburni); the Cumberlandian Combshell (Epioblasma brevidens) and other freshwater mussels; and the Eastern Hellbender Salamander (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis). This paper examines the context and content of this installation, its progression and influences, and themes of ecology and the environment in the Southeast United States.
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    Fabricated Preservation
    Monzel, Daniel Robert (Virginia Tech, 2020-05-19)
    "Fabricated Preservation" aims to push the boundaries with traditional theses, creating a multi-layered experience that blends fact and fiction through a performance that centers around environmental storytelling in virtual reality. The experience questions the balance of theatrical elements in traditional storytelling which forefront text and human characters over architecture, props, and environment, and critically examines how an environment can play a crucial role in a narrative. The narrative itself focuses on one question: if a genealogy company had access to past environments via time travel, what new information could we learn about our ancestors?  The normal perceptions of a "game" are challenged, introducing real world elements to trick the audience and subtly influence how they navigate a virtual space. A complex fictional character is introduced through the performance and developed through the environment, with the hopes that the audience will gain some emotion toward them: either connecting with the character as if they were a close friend, or feeling unsettled that they observed the character's realistic personal space. This voyeuristic theme weaves its way through each layer of the storytelling, poking at the audience's morals with the hopes that they will question the experience around them.  Above all, the main goal of Fabricated Preservation is to challenge the audience to mentally engage with the virtual experience, by paying attention to the details of their environment and constructing their own version of a narrative from those details.
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    Immunology Virtual Reality (VR): Exploring Educational VR Experience Design for Science Learning
    Zhang, Lei (Virginia Tech, 2018-05-14)
    Immunology Virtual Reality (VR) project is an immersive educational virtual reality experience that intends to provide an informal learning experience of specific immunology concepts to college freshmen in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech (VT). The project is an interdisciplinary endeavor between my collaboration between people from different domain areas at VT: Creative Technologies, Education, Biological Sciences, and Computer Sciences. This thesis elaborates on the whole design process of how I created a working prototype of the project demo and shares insights from my design experience.
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    Plasticene
    Eggleston, Carter Christian (Virginia Tech, 2019-11-13)
    Plasticene is an alternative term for Anthropocene, the proposed epoch that follows the Holocene and designates the beginning of significant human impact on Earth. While this moniker carries numerous implications across a range of disciplines, the scholarship of this thesis project is motivated by the creation and exhibition of a body of work that investigates the materiality and physical presence of technological convenience. Plasticene is an exhibition of four looping, digital video animations alongside two interactive sculptural installations. The video-based pieces are explorations into the medium of digital video and how it functions as a carrier of visual information. They were created through iterative manipulations of how that information is digitally compressed, organized, archived, and revealed. The sculptural works are attempts to amplify the physical presence of technologies that can often be hard to see. They were built to perform simple gestures and rely on engaging multiple senses to call into question the routine way in which we interact with different technological devices. This paper examines the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" by Martin Heidegger as a philosophical influence for this investigation before discussing several works by other artists to frame the works in Plasticene within a contemporary context. The individual works from the exhibition are then discussed with regard to their intention, conceptual motivation, and the process of their creation.
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    Propolis: Immersive Environment
    Alarid, Renee Aurelia (Virginia Tech, 2021-02-15)
    Propolis – Creating and using an immersive 2D honey bee environment to educate children between the ages of 3-10, about the importance of honey bees. This capstone project will showcase this researcher's skills in graphic design, spatial sound, architecture, exhibition design, and character illustration. Within this structure, individuals will be able to observe, determine, and make comparisons between a healthy bee colony and one that is fragile and dying.
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    Pulse 63: Live Streaming and Architectural Projection Mapping
    Hardebeck, George Michael Aaron (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-11)
    Pulse63 is a live streaming and projection mapping installation at architectural scale developed for Moogfest 2018, in Durham, NC. The project explores the relationship between telepresence and "superarchitecture". This paper will consider the artistic aspects of these terms through the work of Eduardo Kac, Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, and others. The intent is to create a visual installation at Moogfest that works as a monolithic visual signifier by applying artistically mediated telepresence and "superarchitecture."
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    The Vauquois Experience Exhibit
    Fralin, Scott; Ogle, J. Todd; Hicks, David; Tucker, Thomas J.; Duer, Zachary R.; Choi, DongSoo (Virginia Tech, 2018-11-02)
    This exhibit allows you to walk in the footsteps of others over time and space by immersing you in the experiences of life underground in the French and German World War I tunnels under the village of Vauquois. It is within these tunnels that soldiers slept, ate, took shelter, mined and fought, for over three years, experiencing first-hand the ravages of a war of attrition. Vauquois spans the spectrum of experience in the First World War, from street fighting, to trench warfare, to tunnel warfare. Unlike other examples of mining on the Western Front, the warring armies at Vauquois built underground cities where the combatants spent the majority of their time and in some cases were actually engaged in combat. 2018/11/02 - 2019/03/25