The Writer's Notebook

“The Long Bar" is an augmented and mixed reality multi-media art installation set at the famous Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel. The installation uses AR and MXR technologies to develop historical, culturally significant events into a mulitmodal immersive interactive experience. Participants wearing head mounted display systems, witness virtual characters of various notable figures, including Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, and Jean Harlow, immersed within a real world environment that is modeled on the Raffles Hotel Long Bar they once frequented. This system allows the user to experience pseudo-historical events impressed over a present day real world environment. Through the application of research in occlusion, and by embedding large mesh animated characters, this installation demonstrates the results of the technical research and the conceptual development of immersive multimodal interaction.

This work prefigures new entertainment forms we refer to as location-based entertainment. In this new form, narratives, animation, film based presentation are crafted to occur in real world locations. The form is interactive and audience participative and moves away from the current passive entertainment forms in film, television, theatre and performance and place the viewer inside the fourth wall and immerses the viewer into the performance installation.