Wandering into Sheridan’s Visual Design Institute gave us a glimpse of what has been done in the last few years with visualization technologies. This technology includes technologies that can be used to virtually recreate an environment or situation. Mostly this related to practical application such as police training and city planning.

When applied to the police department they were able to build an interactive application/tutorial that showed how to analyze skid marks on a road to determine the speed of a moving vehicle. There were also tutorials for preserving a crime scene and suspect pursuit.

The City planning modules included a model of the Pearson International Airport that was used to analyze the new road structures. Also included was a Light Rail System simulator for the City of Ottawa. The practical application of this is quite good, potentially saving large sums of money by using proper planning.

The also were able to see an interactive movie that allowed us to collectively vote on the progress of the movie. Voting used a tablet PC with a touch screen to make selections. The practical application seems a bit limited beyond the education field however (such as museums etc). The mainstream use of the technology would be impractical.

Aside from the practical implementation of what we’ve seen though, it does hint to good potential uses of the technology in the future. My opinion is that it is ahead of mainstream acceptance though simply because the current implementation of the story being told, instead of the technological limitations, feels too contrived to allow people to be truly immersed in the experience. Of course, the technological implementation would also need to improve so that the audience can achieve a state of suspended disbelief, meaning that they would not need to look away from the action in order to interact with it.

Well, time to wander again…