making visuals with technology

So this is what has been keeping me busy: “OceanViz” is a realtime visualization application running on Blender 2.49a’s build-in game engine.  I, along with a few other artists, created this visualization as part of a research project at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre in Canada.

Have I been promoting this project to death?  Definitely.  I talked about it in Amsterdam, in Vancouver, online, and pretty much everywhere I get a chance.  But is this cool?  You bet:

View OceanViz in  HD

This video is captured in a rush, I did not even attempt to hide all the debugging cubes or the non-animated species floating around in the scene.  But apart from all that, I am quiet happy with where we are with this project already.  Because what we build is a rather scientific visualization, and not a screensaver, all the fishes are dynamically populated by Python, using a series of XML files for biomass data.  So while it looks quite simple, there is a lot of background coding going on to make it all happen.