Voyagers was a large-scale audio-visual installation created for the United Kingdom’s National Maritime Museum in Greenwhich. This gallery acted as an introduction to the extraordinary depth and range of the Museum’s collections.
2011
By The Light Surgeons
Technical Director James George
The gallery was dominated by a 20-metre projection-mapped wave that stretched the room’s full length. The wave was made up of 26 triangular facets and featured a spherical projector at one end.
Using the triangular shapes as a design template, the team researched and tagged over 300 images and films from the Museum’s vast archives. These were translated into a series of thematic visual journeys that unfolded down the wave structure.
The team devised a generative ocean, visualized through typography. The words were drawn from transcripted interviews with the public about their imagination of the ocean. The transcripts fed into the animation of the ocean and movement of the spherical projector.
The bespoke software allowed the design of the installation to be explored in a simulated environment before the gallery was built.
The animations were then seamlessly video mapped over the complex geometry of the wave structure once in situ.
As the visuals were generated in real time, the story sequencing and timing could be tweaked dynamically on location.
This was built using openFrameworks, and led to many developments which were shared back to the open source community.
Voyagers was a commission by the National Maritime Museum and created in collaboration with Real Studios and Flightphase.