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Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, January 20: Enter the room of desire. It’s a dark shadowy space with a magic mirror. A productive node is attached to the heart and two to the pulses at the wrist. And hey presto! The heart beats and personal thoughts take on forms and play music on a screen. That’s virtual reality, a French image technology.
The multi-media `Virtual Gallery’ with mind-boggling images is opening right here at the Pragati Maidan hall no 15 on January 27 to commemorate India’s 50th year of Independence. The two week-long show, with 18 elements of interactive screening, will be inaugurated by French President Jacques Chirac.
France is not just Jean-Luc Godard, Bordeaux wine and heady perfumes. “That’s the traditional notion of France in India which we want to break. Hence for the first time we are hosting an exhibition of this kind outside France,” Claude Blanchemaison, the Ambassador of France in India, said at the press conference where a selection of digital images were shown.
For the actual show, the screen would be as huge as 26 ft by 4 ft with multiple images fleeting past at terrific speed. One of the 18 elements is a series of five scientific films, The Shapes Of The Invisible. In this an electronic scanning microscope zooms into matter like brass, wood, concrete, aluminum, plastic and even strands of human hair. The enlarged vision projects the very basic atomic structure constituting the matter.
Another 3-D digital film would take the viewers on a journey within the nucleus of a cell, its structure and the DNA branches revealing the fascinating phenomena of the cellular division. The star attraction of the show, however, is the Paris-New Delhi virtual tunnel.
“The tunnel has at one end the Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris and the Pragati Maidan on the other,” said project manager Aurette Leroy. “A person in Delhi wanting to reach the other end will have to dig through masses of matter made of images from the common past of the two countries and vice versa. The diggers at the two end can talk and see each other as images floating in the tunnel space.” They can even meet if they so desire, provided the Delhiite is not distracted by the Cyber Cube installation near by.
Inspired by the new geometry of chaos, the cube would physically transport the crowd into an infinite transparent world of cyber space. It is crafted by means of computer technologies, video sculptures and virtual simulations such as strange attractors, turbulent flows and chaos patterns.
Well, at the end of the gallery of virtual reality, you are likely to feel a little dizzy and a lot more knowledgeable.
