Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) will host its annual open house Friday showcasing different collaborative works from various university departments.
The event — which is free for all — will last from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and will display different projects, including digital video games, undergraduate and graduate virtual reality experiences and 3D scanning research and applications, according to the ACCAD website.
Christopher Coleman, director of the ACCAD, said the open house is a great opportunity to see all the work the center has worked on for the past year.
“We're really interested in seeing how people are reacting to work that's in development. I think that's also a really core piece of it,” Coleman said. “And so you'll come here to the open house, and you'll be seeing things that are projects by faculty, projects that are by our researchers, projects that are by graduate students and also stuff by our undergraduate students.”
Coleman said the open house will also give people a chance to see how ACCAD combines the arts with design for academic purposes.
“We're unique because we're situated at the nexus of all of the arts and designs, so that means music and theater and dance and the studio arts and the design department, and even other, you know, more hidden niches within all of that,” Coleman said. “And thinking about where there could be a place where people from all those areas come together and work with technology and collaborate is really what ACCAD is about.”
Coleman highlighted numerous projects from the open house including different VR experiences. He said the experiences range from elder care, dancing with someone who’s passed away and reacting to a mass casualty incident.
“There's 10 people there, who gets the gauze, who gets the anticoagulant, who need your help first, who can wait for your help five minutes, while you deal with other people,” Coleman said. “This is, like, critical questions, and you can imagine the training involved and that can't just be a quiz on a piece of paper.”
Some of the other projects include a queer dating app simulator, a video game based on a hypothetical sixth mass extinction and a motion capture project in collaboration with the Department of Theater.
Vita Berezina Blackburn, an animation and motion capture specialist, said the motion capture experience provided for the open house will display acting students in full motion capture creating a scene.
“I think these performers are fantastic, and they're going to show a live rehearsal, if you will, on Friday, showcasing the kind of work and the kind of accommodations and actors working in the context of motion capture has to do to look right as a character,” Blackburn said.
She said the scene involves two characters in a museum wearing full motion capture.
“There's two characters in the museum,” Blackburn said. “One of them is wearing a headset, and this is an iPhone that's capturing their (performance). So actually, when we move the camera moves a little bit closer, you're going to see a little bit of a face movement.”
Overall, Blackburn believes this will be a fun experience for all to see what ACCAD does.
“It's going to be a great event,” Blackburn said. “This year is really special because we have been working on an actual class experience, a course experience for MFA actors who study acting in the Department of Theater for probably six or maybe even eight years, because, you know, the pandemic kind of interrupted a lot of things, and the theater department moved into a different space. So, this is the first time that the class was offered.”
For more information on the open house, visit the ACCAD website.