Captain's blog: 2005/05

Doors Open Toronto

Posted Sunday, May 29, 2005 at 5/29/2005 11:58:00 PM

Brought my parents downtown today for the Doors Open Toronto event, where we went to see about six buildings along Bay street. We only had half a day, so I chose that area because it was most densely packed with interesting buildings that I knew of, and all within walking distance of each other.

We started with the Toronto-Dominion Centre 54th floor tour with the spectacular city view. One disappointment was that the washrooms, part of the complete work of the Toronto-Dominion Centre architect Mies Van Der Rohe, were off-limits to the public, so my parents will only be able to see them from the photos I took last year when I was visiting as part of an architecture class field trip.

We headed south on Bay until reaching Front street to quickly glance at the Union Station exterior, as well as the Royal Bank building with its gold-coloured windows that apparently, according to tour guides back in the Toronto-Dominion Centre, actually contained real gold. We made a U-turn by crossing to the east sidewalk of Bay street and began walking north to the Santiago Calatrava-designed BCE place. These were not actually part of the Doors Open event, but were interesting buildings to see anyway and were open. We ate lunch at the BCE food court before touring the beautiful Galleria.

After BCE place we headed north to the CIBC site, where a Doors Open volunteer guided my parents around the grand, Roman-bath-like banking hall while I wandered off snapping pictures. The guide pointed out a few embedded fossils that I didn’t notice before in the central octagonal red marble flooring.

Then we left and crossed over to the west sidewalk of Bay street and headed a block north to visit another bank-type building, again with a grand banking hall but with a different, lighter look and gold grillwork doors everywhere - the Canada Permanent building. They had the original metal vault door installed and intact. You could see the inside of the vault door when you went into the vault room, which had been converted to a small meeting room and was accessible through another door that had been made in the vault wall.

The last major site we went to was the New City Hall further north on Bay/Queen, where the huge council chamber, resembling a flying saucer, was completely open so we went up to explore for a while.

It was getting late and so we left and started walking west on Queen, walking past Osgoode Hall and Campbell House, which were two other Doors Open sites, before finally reaching our car and heading home.

Photo: The lounging area behind the assembly area, all within the saucer-shaped Council Chamber in the New City Hall on Queen. In the foreground is the interesting structure where waiters may come out with food or take back dirty dishes when councilors lounge here.

DigiFest last event and exhibit launch

Posted Saturday, May 28, 2005 at 5/28/2005 12:30:00 AM

Just got back from the Design Exchange (DX) where they held the launch of the digital/tech/arts exhibit WILD, the last part of the DigiFest series of events co-hosted by DX, the Harbourfront Centre and the OSC. I spent the time between eating the veggies and those delicious pseudo-potstickers served in wine glasses, chatting with Paola and other former co-workers at DX/DXNET, and exploring the various exhibits in the medium-sized exhibit area. This will be on display in the publicly accessible ground floor for an entire month until July, so feel free to visit them if you ever pass near the Bay/King downtown financial core area.

Kora, an artist from Belgium stood beside the two large hi-def flat-panel displays showing a virtual 3D environment, each with an on-screen avatar controlled by a computer keyboard and mouse on a table to navigate the same 3D world. The whole installation was part of a project in which live video of an event could be played in the virtual world, and that the ideal installation should have been actual projection screens boxing the user on all sides for a more complete immersive experience. I learned that the nVIDIA video card could handle the three screens, so long as you attach an additional adaptor to allow three VGA outputs for the three projectors. Found out that the 3D environment was created using Quake editor and 3D Studio Max, so I then wondered how they got a live video stream to play in Quake - it was a custom mod they coded. Nearly all of the usual Quake controls were absent, and navigation was done using the mouse controls.

This exhibit was particularly interesting for me because I’ve done similar work back in 2000, when Adobe released a beta authoring software for creating online 3D multi-user worlds called Adobe Atmosphere. It took an annoyingly long time to create, and the interact-able geometry had to be very primitive but I did manage to create a virtual art gallery for my renaissance art presentation as well as a virtual island for my end-of-year project. Now that I’ve seen Kora’s project, if I ever need to create a 3D multi-user world again then I will very likely look at using Quake, Unreal editor or some other well-established game modding-related tools due to their rich graphical features, ready-built interactivity features and general stability.

The other great exhibit was the Tom Tompson-themed rear-projection onto a painter’s canvas in which you used the painter’s brush on the canvas and the projected image of a Tom Thomspon image responded as if you were actually painting, building up the layers of the painting. The creators were a group of four who had met each other as students at the Canadian Film Centre. I noticed an ordinary SONY video camera aimed at the back side of the canvas, and connected to a Mac computer. I also noticed the camera had some kind of black filter, so I asked what it was and found out it was the magnetic disk from a floppy disk, serving as a makeshift infra-red filter. I asked further about how the infra-red comes into play in detecting the user’s brush location, and Trevor the one who set up the brush explained that there was an infra-red emitter embedded inside the brush head. USB supplied the power, which I remember is 5Volts. So it was this hidden infra-red emitter and the filtered video camera that allowed the computer to detect the user’s brush location and update the projected canvas image accordingly. Very neat.

All in all a great evening.

Then on the way home I saw another neat piece of technology, although this one was a mass-produced consumer product - an Ambush Warrior mountain board. My first time seeing a mountain board, which the girl explained was like a snowboard on wheels. I prefer to see it as a skateboard on wheels. I took a few pictures before getting off the subway car.

Tip about Doors Open Toronto: For this event happening this weekend in which historic or culturally important buildings all over Toronto are open to the public, one way to easily map out and find out what buildings are open in any particular area of interest is to use google maps, loaded to Toronto, ON and then local search type in the Doors Open Toronto buildings listings url (http://www.doorsopen.org/building/ ) and presto - you now have a custom map to plan your day. For some reason, the Toronto-Dominion Centre at Bay/King, which features a spectacular view of the whole city from the top 54th floor, does not seem to get plotted on Google maps. But most of the other ones get plotted so it can still be useful.

Picture on the right: Those delicious pseudo-potsticker things served in empty wine glasses at the exhibit opening event.

CyberARTS Open House, Tenth Anniversary

Posted Friday, May 20, 2005 at 5/20/2005 01:11:00 PM

The CyberARTS open house, tenth anniversary (started 1995) and graduation ceremony took place last night, so as a former graduate I was invited back. Met other Cyber grads, various teachers and finally got my old sketchbook back. The Cyber-wing with its iMacs, G4s, smartboards and projectors looked relatively the same, as did the art studio except for all the new wall decorations, an eye-wash station upstairs (Mrs. Forrest joked that it was to wash her tears when she couldn’t take it anymore), a new glass sound barrier between the upstairs and the main area. Only about seven former classmates came, so after the event some of us went to continue our little reunion at Second Cup for another two hours before heading home.

Crafts with Pringles Chip Canisters

Posted Tuesday, May 03, 2005 at 5/3/2005 12:50:00 PM

It’s slightly sad seeing two empty Pringles cans stacked in our recycling bin. Not because I’m longing for more over-salted Pringles chips, as we are still slowly munching through several canisters from last week’s everything-$1 Food Basics promotion.

Instead, the sadness comes from the realization that if I don’t come up with any ideas that will extend the useful life of these empty canisters, they will simply be taken away by the municipal recycling trucks next week. This fate is environmentally-friendly and therefore quite acceptable, but somehow it seems rather un-creative.

Making piggy banks out of them was the first idea that came to mind, since their removable, soft-plastic lids could easily have a coin slot cut right out of them. But I don’t need any piggy banks at the moment. The most amazing idea I’ve seen so far is the Pringles directional antennae (aka Cantenna, 802.11b Homebrew WiFi Antenna) so you can aim and extend the range of your wireless laptop, but until I get a working wireless laptop this wouldn’t be useful to me.

Eventually, doing a Google search I found an entire page of Pringles Canister ideas which has a lot of good ideas I might use, but I am still searching.

Hope this was useful to anyone else looking to do crafts or electronic projects with Pringles Cans. If anyone has any further great ideas please let me know so you can contribute to my worthy cause of saving empty Pringles Chips Cans from the municipal recycling trucks. Thanks!


Photo by Greg Rehm, 802.11b Homebrew WiFi Antenna ( http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/has.html )