As
it happened, a possibility to exhibit videos recorded with this new technology
appeared. The Swedish craft and design museum, Röhsska Museum, had an event
where alternative and practice based learning and teaching was in focus. It was
a perfect forum for testing our new technique on a real life audience. Now
everything had to happen in one week. Intense coding to finish the software,
journeys around the country to record some of the most skilled blacksmith and
more coding since a few small thigs turned out to be less than optimized when
running a sharp project. Still, both hardware and software proved surprisingly
stable. The cameras shut down sometimes but that was easily fixed by pulling
out and then reinserting their usb3 cable. Recording mode was otherwise running
flawless (on the second highest resolution), the only challenge was that the
cameras needed to stand between 0,7-1 meter away from the one recorded to get
enough sharp pixels. Playback mode was a little bit less perfect. Still almost
no bugs or unwanted side features, the ones discovered where easily dealt with
by turning of and then on the software, but the audience at Röhsska reacted on the
pixelated result. The cameras record beautiful point clouds from where they
stand but also less perfects points in their periphery. When we combine four
great sides into one body the four great sides bring eight peripheries with
them, resulting in bad quality pixles hanging in the air just outside of the
high quality point cloud. Otherwise, this new way of recording and documenting activity
is everything we could hope for. It is absolutely awesome to be able to put
something movable from our physical environment and put it into a digital one
without animation. We just turned the perspectives of what “virtual” reality is
to reality.
The awesome blacksmiths recorded are Bertil Pärmsten at Bräcke smedja, Therese
Engdahl at Therese smedja and Julius Pettersson at Manufaktursmide.