Child of Now
Child of Now is an ambitious, mixed-reality experience conceived by artist Robert Walton in collaboration with First Nations author and activist Claire G. Coleman. Child of Now combines original storytelling, animation, immersive sound design, built environments, and virtual reality from an extraordinary team of leading Australian artists and IT professionals. The first public installation of Child of Now was at Arts Centre Melbourne in February 2022.
The Human Computer Interaction group at the University of Melbourne led the development of the software and extended our volumetric capture system to support the project. The project featured several innovations and achievements, including
- Real time capture of participants throughout the experience
- Automated triggering of captures alongside performance audio, video, and lighting.
- Automated processing of each participant’s hologram using several developed algorithms
- Automated network synchronization between multiple nodes in the exhibit
- Oculus Hand tracking interactions alongside hologram rendering.
Project team
Andrew Irlitti, University of Melbourne Technical Lead, Research Fellow in Mixed Reality
Frank Vetere, Professor
Thuong Hoang, School of Information Technology, Deakin University
Mesut Latifoglu, Research Software Engineer
Robert Walton, Lead Artist
Jingcheng Wang, Software Engineer, Melbourne eResearch Group
Martin Reinoso, Software Engineer
Yang Liu, Software Engineer, Melbourne eResearch Group