Zoom Raleigh Opening

Click here to see ZOOMRaleigh!

Come check out ZoomRaleigh in downtown Raleigh, near the Raleigh Times at the corner of Fayetteville and Hargett streets. Open now and until December 31, 2009.

For ZoomRaleigh, I made all the 3D elements. I modeled the buildings and did the animations in Maya 2009. After completing a true to landscape model of downtown Raleigh, I made camera animations that circled the city. I then passed these along to the other awesome people who worked on the project, Melissa Church and Lee Cherry, who did the interactive elements and coding. Our art director for all of this was Patrick Fitzgerald, who oversees the Advanced Media Lab of North Carolina State University.

Check out one of the camera "zooms" below:

Final Look Test from Stacie McGowan on Vimeo.

Advanced Media Lab

More about the project:

Zoom Raleigh is a rich interactive interface that has been installed in the window of the Urban Design Center right on Fayetteville Street. Further refining and developing 3D interfaces for exploring urban spaces. This project is the culmination of that work along with the refinement of large touch-screen interfaces.

Zoom Raleigh is co-sponsored by the Raleigh City Museum, City of Raleigh Planning Department, American Image Graphics, and Empire Properties.

Zoom Raleigh has incorporated multi-media montages, archival materials, historic photos, and interviews with Raleigh leaders like Greg Hatem. The result is a massive interactive screen that sits behind glass that entices passers-by to reach out and play with the interface. Part art, and part technical feat, the work both educates the public and reinforces the technology culture of Raleigh.

Zoom Raleigh as a 3D interactive digital installation allows viewers to interact with digital media related to the history of the arts, architecture and culture of Raleigh, NC. Featuring an interactive 3D visualization of downtown Raleigh, viewers can manipulate the digital model by rotating the city itself, selecting buildings of interest and interacting with narrated slideshows of historical photographs and text specific to selected sites.

Exploiting experimental touch and hand gesture recognition technology developed by students and staff a the Advanced Media Lab at NC State University, College of Design, this system utilizes camera recognition, back screen projection and large-scale store-front windows as display screens. Zoom Raleigh represents a new generation in inexpensive human/computer interaction platforms that can be operated in interior/exterior urban environments.