The Expo is the third largest event a country can to host (after the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup). In recent times though, sucessive events have failed to ignite imaginations like the old World Fair – the forerunners of Expo.

Enter the might of China’s burgeoning economy and the determination of their government to put second city Shanghai on the global stage in the same way as the Olympics did Beijing in 2008. Shanghai has been transformed, not without controversy, and the 2010 event is on a scale unprecedented.

Ireland Pavilion - Expo 2010

The Expo theme is “Better City, Better Living” and the Irish Pavilion audio visual content, designed and produced by Martello Media/Noho sought to deliver a wide array of images of Irish art, culture and landscapes – a taste of Irish living. More information on the beautifully designed building and the content within is available at www.irelandexpo2010.com.

I worked on the installation of solid-state HD media players, synched video/lightshow hardware and software (LightFactory) and a touch-screen e-card system developed by Originate in Dublin. Pressure was high and the learning curve was steep but I think we pulled it off in the end.

Creativity Wall

Where Expo is concerned, it is an experience like no other, and a design/architecture/technology/innovation Eden where the struggle to get noticed in a show with hundreds of countries involved breeds exciting designs and inspiring content.

Unfortunately, workload and time constraints limited the number of pavilions I actually got to visit, but with each unique building it became more apparent that with a new build – the future is in designing not just the building, but the experience that visitors have of that building on a visit. This will apply to the office blocks and supermarkets of the future, and the ground is being broken at events like Expo.

Outstanding from an architectural point of view were Mexico, New Zealand, Ireland and Denmark, to name but a few. I particularly liked the Danish approach, “borrowing” the Little Mermaid from Copenhagen and laying on hundreds of bikes and a spectacular bike ramp.

China Pavilion

China’s behemoth pavilion stood over the landscape of the Expo as towering inverted crimson pyramid – a constant reminder that this is a country no-one can ignore.

Interesting too was the use of hydrogen fuel cell transport throughout the site and a constant “sustainable living” propaganda from both the Expo organisers and the participating countries. Ironic that in the near distance, the towers of Shanghai were often hidden from view by smog.

Expo 2010 continues until September, so if you’re in that part of the world definitely check it out. It’s massive, so a 3-day pass would be a wise way to do things. It’ll be tiring too, but you can always drop in to The Porterhouse for a pint and a rest.

My Expo 2010 Flickr album is here.

It appears that a lot of the content was developed entirely from scratch. There’s very little evidence of “Out of the Box” exhibits like many of the ones I caught at Valencia’s science museum. Exhibits explored various themes from the inner workings of the human body to the development of Birmingham city among many other things.

Everywhere there was  evidence to be found of careful design and innovation. Without rattling on too much, it’s obvious that extensive  funding (and time) went into the development of each exhibit around the core themes.

I’ll just post a few examples below of things that stood out, but bottom line is – if you’re in Birmingham, ThinkTank is worth a visit.

Exploring the mechanics of the human body, some beautiful physical models of muscle and skeletal systems not only illustrate how these systems work but  allow visitors to manipulate  them and see what our bones and muscles look like in different positions. Most impressive however is a large model of the human heart embedded in a wall illustrating the circulatory system.

Beside the model heart is a handle for visitors to hold, hold it for a few seconds and the model heart will begin beating in time with your pulse. This was an ingenious way of engaging an audience. I even watched one young kid hold the bar, then go for a run, and check his pulse a second time to see the difference.

Hold the handle and watch the heart beat.

In the same section, a graphic interactive video installation takes groups of three through the process involved in a hip replacement. Visitors take the role of anesthetist, surgeon or assistant (I think) and help keep the necessary vitals at the ready during the whole op, which takes under five minutes to complete.

The standout feature here is the amazing content – awe inspiring footage of a real hip replacement. The interactivity is hindered a bit by a cumbersome rollerball-and-click interface, but despite this, it’s a great little installation.

Assist the surgical staff on the video screens.

A simple but effective tool was used to illustrate mortality due to various diseases from statistics measured in the UK. A grid of one hundred illuminated squares representing one person each. Choose an illness, and immediately a number of squares turns red instead of green. Those are real people out of one hundred who will die from the disease you selected.

What impressed me here was simple data visualisation in a physical installation to help understand social reality. This could have been done on a screen, but I just don’t think it would have had the same impact. People, after all, die on screen all the time.

How many people will die of...?

One of the coolest little installations dealt with how bats use sonar to locate prey. The visitor places their head inside a fixture not unlike a periscope, with speakers over their ears. There is no screen inside, the user is blind to the outside world, but can hear the clicks of the bat’s sonar signal. As the fixture is rotated, if a moth is in the “field” of view a faint ‘echo’ can also be heard. Push “fire” a few times and then look at the board to see what you ‘caught’.

Use sonar to catch lunch.

There was plenty more, but those were highlights. As I’ve said, ThinkTank is well worth a visit, I’ll be heading back given the chance.

Cadbury's Bournville

Cadbury World is actually three separate self guided tours, in three separate buildings. This might sound unwieldy, but meant staff to direct us to one section ahead of another, more crowded part of the tour – keeping us occupied while the crowds dispersed.

Tilt-controlled platform game.

The “Essences” experience begins by telling the story of Dairy Milk through a beautifully realised visual presentation spread through three rooms and across screens and spaces. Ghostly projections of characters appear within cartoon-like sets using what looks to be a technique called “Musion Eyeliner“.

The Dairy Milk Story

In the final room a beautiful, polished steel pipe stretches across a counter behind which chirpy staff members instruct visitors to touch the pipe. The realisation that the pipe was warm – filled with oozy melted milk chocolate – cause a stir of excitement in the group. We each chose a filling, or “essence” and staff poured warm, creamy chocolate into our paper cups before sending us away. Not a screen, projector, or camera in sight.

'Essences' tasting room.

The original Bourneville Building accommodates a more traditional museum focusing on the company’s history, culture and development. An impressive scale model of the Bourneville area and the original factory is the centrepiece.

The main attraction, the Cadbury World experience included another tour with audio visual accompaniment taking visitors from a recreation of the street upon which the Cadbury business began, through to the process by which chocolate is made, and into the actual factory itself.

The final section of the Cadbury World experience included a myriad digital toys all tied into the brand or past advertising. This was playtime for me, and there was plenty of inspiration to be found. Tilt-controlled platform games, a “Cadbury World” spherical projection, make your own chocolate statuette and a few computer vision toys added to the mix.

Cadbury World - spherical projection

The concept development around the brand was very strong. Use of space in some circumstances absolute genius (read… at the exit, with a beautiful “Purple Planet” optical illusion). The entire tour struck a nice balance between interpretative exhibits and the real-world charm of the product, brand, and made good use of the real factory floor as an attraction.

Make yourself out of chocolate...

Unfortunately, to the trained eye, some of the digital toys looked dated. Frame-rates slipping and responsiveness lagging to levels which might not have been noticable this time last year and to which the public might scorn in a year or two’s time. I got a sense that as the public’s critical eye evolves older hardware/software combinations might find themselves lacking the punch required to maintain attention.

Overall though, the entire experience was entertaining, educational, very enjoyable and highly recommended next post – the excellent ThinkTank Science Museum in Birmingham’s city centre.

The idea was simple; a big, chunky handle which slides from right to left. Left means older, right means newer. As you slide the handle, the growth of the city animates fluidly on a large screen.

The big, chunky handle from the final kiosk build. Designed by Fire.

Back then I proposed a solution… a large linear variable resistor and a means of measuring the current from that device. The position of the handle could be deduced and the animation controlled from there. Two year’s later, working with Niall at Noho, the opportunity arose to make it a reality… here’s a quick summary of how (click the links to get to the ingredients!).

The ingredients… a linear potentiometer, an Arduino, Firmata Library for Arduino, Serial Proxy server for Windows, Adobe Flash CS4 and the AS3_Glue API for Flash. All wrapped up in a SWF Studio projector. The position of the slider on the linear potentiometer is measurable as a varying current reaching the Arduino. The Firmata library is built to make this measurement easy, and a simple smoothing algorithm applied takes most of the “wobble” out of the data.

The combination of AS3_Glue and Serial Proxy make it easy for Flash to talk to the Arduino (mostly just listening though!) in the same way as it talks to a web server.With every slight change in the current (moving the slider) the Arduino sends a message to Flash, which moves the playhead to a certain point in the video. At a later development stage this was done using an easing Tween function for an extra sexy “swoosh” feel.

Early, badly wired test just to see if it would work! (Had used a rotation pot beforehand... cheaper!)

The application effectively lets a user “scrub” through a short video clip, which is specially authored to present information in an easily understood way.

In addition to the original brief, and dipping my toes into the realm of interaction design for an enjoyable spell, a “FutureGlass” was added… touch the screen to move around a window which reveals a satellite image of the city as seen today. User testing proved this an attractive extra feature, with the public amazed to find out that places like Dublin’s famous Custom House Quay used to be underwater!

The final arrangement of the equipment for installation into the kiosk. Note: Ground stuff, ground it, and then ground it again! I learned the hard way!

Full code samples would be, to be honest, really messy… and I don’t see myself having time to tidy them up in the near future. If you’re interested in building something like this, and think I might be able to help… get in touch!

The Medieval Dublin timeline kiosk can be found at the MyCity Exhibition (previous post), situated in the Wood Quay Offices of Dublin City Council. Thanks go to Noho for the opportunity to work on this, Kevin Cannon for always having a suggestion exactly when I needed one, compliments to Fire for a great design and build on the kiosk, and if you’re looking for a linear resistor like the one we used, call Techcom in Ireland and tell them I sent you!

The final lab test, before installation on site.

Back in June, when I first started tinkering with Silverlight, I had mixed first impressions. The procedure required to install the authoring environment is, quite literally, a dog. You need Visual Studio, countless upgrades and patches, the Silverlight toolkit, Expression blend and a few more service packs… it took nearly two days (and several attempts) to get it all right!

Having got through that trauma, I was impressed at the way Silverlight authoring works, XAML layouts and the “code behind” structure separate function from form, and while it lacks a design tool within Visual Studio, this wasn’t something I missed from Flash. I don’t design, I build. I didn’t (perhaps as a result) bother working with Expression Blend. I like the old tools I’ve relied on for years… Photoshop, Illustrator, and emails to the designer

Being a developer, receiving designs and breaking them up into XAML was second nature, having spent years creating websites from Photoshop flats. When the time came to write the code, I was immediately impressed by Visual Studios dynamic code correction tool. Not sure what it’s called, but it’s great… it’s aware of any imported classes, declared variables and prompts you to include them, auto-completing as you type. Nice.

The technology that the Medieval Dublin project uses is called DeepZoom. Flash can do this, just not quite as quickly and easily as the tools that have been provided for Silverlight. The guys at Noho gave me a 40 megapixel render of their Dublin map to import into DeepZoom using DeepZoom Composer.

It took a few attempts (unsurprising given the size of the image) but eventually I had a DeepZoom prepared image for use in the app. From there began the process of adding interactivity, some visual effects and other media. Most of this was relatively simple, video, imagery, audio elements … all were integrated painlessly in the Silverlight app.

The biggest challenge I found was in the DeepZoom system itself. The MultiScaleImage element in SilverLight is documented pretty poorly, and the default SilverLight project exported from DeepZoom composer has some dodgy code which contributors around the net have corrected and posted for dev’s to use. I had to piece together hints from lots of different sources.

Of course, statistics as to who actually saw the e-card when sent will be interesting, as the biggest problem with Silverlight is it’s install base. To encourage users to install the plugin I set up the web page to degrade from Silverlight to Flash to a static html alternative enabling a rich-media carrot in the form of a flash video to entice people to proceed.

I hope to follow up with some of the code, once I’ve cleaned it up and made it modular for future applications. Overall, first impressions of SilverLight are that the authoring environment is pretty good, the MultiScaleImage capability has amazing potential and power and that in general, cross platform it’s performance is pretty zippy.

It’s a pity there’s relatively poor documentation online… maybe it’s pitched at Microsoft Devs who’ve been working in VS for years… I don’t know, but I hope to post soon to do my bit to put that right!