The Assimilator Project

A Mobile, Live Aerial Photography Project

This was a whole lotta fun. Me, Shelly Farnham, and Juice Box created an “Art Car” for Burning Man.

The concept was to capture a persons visual perspective and transport it 300 feet up into the air! Using a large 7 foot diameter helium balloon, LCD “VR” goggles, a matrix switcher (and other A/V components), and some X10 wireless video gear. The effect was totally bad-ass.

Folks freaked out once they put the goggles on and were looking at themselves and the things around them from 100, 200, 300, even 400 feet in the air.

We got a generous art grant from Ignition NW, a Seattled-based non-profits arts foundation. An article in C|Net mentions our maiden voyage at a local arts festival:

One project benefiting from the grants was Assimilator. The creation of 28-year-old Seattle software engineer Peter Brown and two partners, Shelly Farnham and “Juice Box,” the Assimilator is a weather balloon from which hangs a video camera that feeds live video of the nearby surroundings wirelessly to a screen inside a nearby art car, as well as onto a pair of virtual-reality goggles.
“We wanted to be able to give the some perspective to three or four different people as we’re driving around,” Brown said, adding that his team was testing Assimilator at Critical Massive in advance of bringing it to Burning Man this year.

And because the art car can drive around, Assimilator will be able to continually project a moving image.

We also were happy recently to recently speak at a Seattle dorkbot which was featuring ariel photography projects.

Pictures

Concept

The concept was to assimilate peoples entire visual perspective, and force them to see an entirely new one. Weather from 500' up in the air from the balloon cam, or from 6' up using when the helmut cam was worn by someone else.

Here is the basic layout of the overall system:

The Final Machine

The finished vehicle was covered with non-functional electronics on the outside (and a whole lot of spray foam) and a fully functional mobile video remote switching system.