#FastForwardPHL #WhatsNextPHL: Meet Fast Forward Presenters >> Stephen Lane & Aline Normoyle

What is your Big Idea for Philadelphia?

Civic Portal: Previewing monuments in public spaces using augmented reality

The Civic Portal project combines augmented and virtual reality technologies to help designers and communities work together to create public artworks, such as statues, park fixtures, and murals.

Using an app on their mobile phone, users can preview proposed monuments in the actual space where it will be located via augmented reality (AR). Designers can upload models as well as optionally add, delete, swap out and modify components. AR functionality will allow users to walk around the monument and inspect it from different angles. Through the app, people will be able to provide feedback via text and voice. This feedback will be viewable from a central server, which will host a moderated, public message board for showing comments. The central server will also support managing models and previewing them virtually via a 3D web application that optionally supports virtual reality.

We are in the process of building a prototype based on monument designs from the Monument Lab, in which the public were invited to propose their own ideas for public art.

The Civic Portal project is joint work between PennDesign, Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, Venturi Labs and Penn Libraries. This effort is funded by the Knight Foundation

Venturi Labs

Venturi Labs, LLC is a technology organization affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. Our goal is to link industry partners with incredible students for the purposes of creating cutting edge technologies in graphics, games, simulation, training, education and healthcare.

Dr. Lane is a proven leader with over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience managing the design, development and commercialization of state-of-the-art software technology for use in Interactive Entertainment, Virtual Reality, Computer Animation, and Distributed Training and Simulation applications. Dr. Lane is a Professor of Practice at the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, the Director of the Computer Graphics and Game Technology Masters Program and the President of Venturi Labs.

Aline Normoyle's interests bridge engineering and art. She has worked in the domains of simulation and animation for over 20 years with organizations such as Disney Research, the Robotics Institute at CMU, the SIG Center for Computer Graphics, and MAK Technologies. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College as well as the director of software development for Venturi Labs and Savvy Sine. In addition to the Civic Portal project, her current collaborations include work with collaborative drawing robots, games for teaching causal statistics, and research into hand animation.