Computer Graphics World

April 2009 35 Art•Augmented Reality n n n n and peace. If they stop the display to focus on one picture, the tint disappears. Benayoun laughs, "[e officials] saw the monitors and said, 'Oh, good. is is the red and blue.' And I said, 'Yes. You un- derstand everything.' " Also inside the museum space is a small brass replica of the Arc with all the details of its sculptures created to scale. e brass replica is an input device. "People can feel the sculptures," Benayoun says. "As they move [the replica], they control a life-size video projection of the sculptures." e most radical part of the exhibition, though, will be a few steps up: AR binocu- lar telescopes installed on the roof. From the Arc's rooftop, visitors have a magnifi- cent, 360-degree view of Paris. By looking into the telescopes, they will see an aug- mented version of that reality. "We have a complete 3D model of Paris that we can integrate with the HD video from a camera inside the telescope," Bena- youn explains. He expects to install the first applications in May. "At the beginning, they will see some- thing simple, like words printed on monu- ments," Benayoun says. "And, if they keep looking at the monument, they'll see more information. Another use will be to see the past, to see how an area looked one or two centuries ago, using 3D models that are fully integrated inside the view." With the 3D model, they can also increase the virtual light in the city for those looking through the telescope at night. But, Benayoun's vision for the telescope reaches far beyond historical data and ar- chitectural applications. "Imagine," he says, "that the weather in the sky over the city that you see through the telescope isn't related to actual weather, but to the emo- tional state of people in the city. We could have people in districts say how they feel today on their cell phones and on the Web, and that would impact the kinds of clouds that form in the sky over their districts. We want to think more about living together and sharing; to learn more about how we can live together. So, we are creating new software and thinking about many uses." "We" is a group of students, artists, and researchers working within a university center called CITU, cofounded in 2004 by Benayoun and Jean-Pierre Balpe, a professor at the University of Paris 8, sometime after Benayoun closed his pro- duction studio. Funded by the European Union, the Culture and Communication ministry (DRAC Ile de France), and the Ile de France region, the multi-disciplin- ary group blends artistic creation and scientific research in new media fields. Benayoun serves as the art director. "I was obliged to have a company to do Quarxs and my VR installations," Benay- oun says. "But now I can do all those things through CITU." Benayoun first put CITU's AR tele- scopes to work in "Cosmopolis," a giant immersive installation created in 2005 for the French Year in China and installed in Shanghai, ChongQing, Chengdu, and Bei- jing. Twelve four-by-three-meter screens hanging from a circular structure displayed video of constantly changing urban envi- ronments in 12 cities: Paris, Berlin, Bar- celona, Chicago, Johannesburg, Cairo, Sao Paulo, Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Hong Kong. Twelve AR telescopes pointed at the screens ringed the outside of the circle; benches inside the circle allowed visitors to view the other side of the screens. When participants looked through the telescopes, though, they saw five panora- mas of one city. A custom system tracked their viewpoint, and custom software col- lected and combined the digital images to create one virtual city from all the intersect- ing gazes. Visitors inside the circle saw that assembled panorama. "People painted a world city by mixing 12 different cities from around the world," Benayoun explains. "ey painted with their eyes. If they looked very fast, the im- age was transparent. If they looked longer, they painted details." Mapping Global Emotions Benayoun's "Mechanics of Emotion" series, on the other hand, considers people's emotional view of the world by analyzing data on the Internet. His idea is that we could think of the Inter- net as a world nervous system, one that knows the planet's pain and pleasure. So, again using custom software, he queries the English language data for specific words—fear, perhaps, or joy. At first, Benayoun created a tag cloud People visiting "Centropolis," Benayoun's installation for France's year in China, saw a composite world city "painted" by 12 viewers looking into custom-designed, augmented-reality binoculars.

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