For six weeks this winter, people taking a walk through New York City's Rockefeller Center at night saw their actions mimicked on the sidewalk in Lilliputian fashion. From above, a hanging projector beamed a 4'×6' carpet of light that framed the adventures of small, lifelike animated characters. This sidewalk show was actually a public art project called Pedestrian by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar of Riverbed Studios in New York.
To create realistic characters for a vivid city scene in Pedestrian, the duo relied on motion capture from a Vicon system at the University of California-Irvine and another system at Modern Uprising Studios in Melville, N.Y., for cleanup. The footage was then imported into Discreet Character Studio, an extension of 3ds max. Eshkar, who focuses on character design, created 40 different bodies in Physique that would walk, run, shadowbox, and play hopscotch. The 13-minute video follows characters through urban environments like plazas and parks.
Instead of including obvious New York landmarks, the team developed somewhat familiar environments — like a Rockefeller Center-inspired skating rink — that Kaiser hoped would spark viewers' imaginations. He says the video is meant to evoke a dream-like quality, and the motion-captured footage allowed “having uncanny realism while at the same time realizing that it's completely synthetic.”
A 10,000ANSI lumens projector beamed the looped video to the sidewalk at Rockefeller Center, and the video was also displayed at the Eyebeam Gallery in Chelsea and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Future plans have Pedestrian traveling to the sidewalks of Washington D.C., San Francisco, Germany, and Bruges, Belgium.
Trevor Boyer is associate editor for Video Systems.
