Alt Ethos: Experiential Design Studio creates disruption at Denver Startup Week by melding various forms of light, sound, interactivity and creative technology into memorable interactive experiences. Alt Ethos will showcase four exhibitions and participate in one panel discussion during the sixth annual Denver Startup Week. Alt Ethos has come a long way since last year’s Denver Startup Week. Events will take place September 25 – 29 at various locations in Denver, Colorado.
The Commons on Champa has been the home of Alt Ethos since its inception. The support of this public hub for entrepreneurship serves as a platform for Alt Ethos to give back to the community during Denver Startup Week (DSW) where The Commons serves at Basecamp. Alt Ethos will showcase three exhibitions; “Gateway”, an interactive LED Hallway; “Social Wall”, where members of a community get their photo taken to create a mosaic of self-portraits to form a larger symbol logo of DSW; and “LED Clouds” illuminating the event space with ethereal lights. The Commons on Champa is located at 1245 Champa Street.
Pon Pon is the late night hangout of Denver Startup Week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, nights, 9pm to 1:30am, during Denver Startup Week and is located at 2528 Walnut Street. Free beer, wine & wells with DSW wristband with DJs and dancing. Alt Ethos fills the ceiling with a balloon surface sculpture and audio interactive visualization mapping in the gallery to entice late night socialites to fill their heads with wonderment.
Win a cloud! Come drop your business card into the fishbowl in the events space at The Commons and be entered in a drawing to win your very own LED Cloud.
Alt Ethos’ Paul Elsberg shares his expertise as a regional representative for Hackster.io for the panel entitled, “From Idea To Production”. Come and hear from the experts at Hackster.io and the Hardware Studio – a joint initiative from Kickstarter, Avnet and Dragon Innovation. Learn about the essentials of creating a compelling story that launches your idea into the marketplace while preparing yourself to scale! The panel is sponsored by AVNET and will be held at the Alliance Center in Denver from 2-5PM on Tuesday, September 26.
Alt Ethos is seeking contractors for hire and will be at this year’s DSW Job Fair and Showcase. Come visit the Alt Ethos booth to find out more about positions in creative technology. The Job Faire will take place on Wednesday, September 27th, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm, at the McNichols Building in Civic Center Park at 144 W Colfax Ave.
At last year’s events, Alt Ethos was listed as “Companies to Watch from Denver Startup Week” from Denverite and participate in DSW with a presentation entitled, “The New Dispensation: Virtual Reality” presenting a VR experience. They also introduced the Denver audience to “the Cube” a 6’ tangible interactive projection cube. The cube has since shown up at events around Denver such as 5280 Magazine’s Top of the Town. Since last year, Alt Ethos has proven themselves as a viable local company working with museums, local businesses, and public institutions.
Zac with the new Alt Ethos t-shirt and a sneak peak at the Social Wall.
Please join the celebration and education of Denver Startup Week, September 25 – 29 at various locations in Denver, Colorado. Help Alt Ethos celebrate their successes by visiting the disruptive experiential design on display at The Commons on Champa and Pon Pon.
——
Alt Ethos is an experiential design studio specializing in creative technology. We are a group of dedicated creators, designers, and engineers creating innovative projects for the modern world. We meld various forms of light, sound, interactivity and creative technology into memorable interactive experiences. We create a variety of custom creative technology solutions with an emphasis on storytelling, hands-on participatory learning, and user experience design to amplify interactions with various media in the physical space.
Alt Ethos donates a portion of its revenues to its sister organization, Denver Arts + Technology Advancement (DATA), a nonprofit organization striving to create a vanguard community center for public engagement, cultivating and strengthening local community by putting research, education, creation, and exhibition together under the same roof.
Alt Ethos and the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery invite you to the grand opening of Soundscape, a real-time audio/visual experience. Step into this immersive exhibit where physical presence creates music and live visuals. The opening coincides with FCMoD’s David Bowie LaserDome event. Tickets for the LaserDome can be purchased here. The opening event is free and open to the public with hor d’oeuvres and non-alcoholic beverages provided alongside a cash bar. The opening will be held on Saturday, June 24, 2017 from 7pm to 10:30pm at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery.
As you walk through the Music and Sound Lab a mysteriously glowing room catches your eye. Out of curiosity you step inside and soon discover that your position inside the room is creating music in real time. The intimate scale of the room widens below you as you walk suspended in space. The wall pulsates over your coordinates on the floor. As the moments pass, others join in creating an ensemble of organic sound.
This exhibition was conceived through the collaboration of Alt Ethos Experiential Design studio and staff at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. Alt Ethos custom designed this interactive exhibition to create a meaningful experience for patrons to learn, reflect, and have fun through hands-on explorations. Visitors control a multichannel sound system and projection-mapped visuals through physical movement.
The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery (FCMoD) is a history and science museum filled with interactive exhibits and fascinating artifacts which tell the stories of Northern Colorado. The museum creates meaningful opportunities to connect body movement to sound through hands-on and collections-based explorations in science and culture.
Alt Ethos is an experiential design studio that synthesizes digital and physical environments into unexpected realities. Alt Ethos are artists, designers, and engineers creating innovative projects for the modern world. They meld various forms of light, sound, and creative technology into shared interactive experiences.
Please join us for the opening of Soundscape, an instrumental environment exhibition. This unique exhibition changes the ways in which we view music and exploration in museums. The opening will be held on Saturday, June 24, 2017 at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery at 408 Mason Court, Fort Collins, Colorado.
Matt Maes is a Denver animator focused on immersive and interactive technology. He is Chief Influence Officer ofAlt Ethos, Ltd and is also an executive member of the nonprofit organization Denver Arts and Technology Advancement (D.A.T.A.)
It is with great pride that we announce our most recent work with an organization with which we’ve shared a close bond and rich history: The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery or FCMoD as it’s most commonly known is a partnership merged between the Fort Collins Museum and Science Discovery Center in 2008 for the purpose of inspiring scientific education through creative, engaging educational experiences, all under one roof.
The museum’s layout tells their focus on creating experiences which balance education with interactive audio play in an open format through various applications and specialties. Walk through the front doors, past the lobby and you’ll witness an interior aid out with strategically placed installations meant to evoke interactive sound based experiences between groups of all ages. The museum maintains a reputation for its exhibits which encourage self-learning, requiring little to no prior instruction.
The museum brings in many families with children who naturally gravitate towards the most fun exhibits such as the Reactable and Build Your Own Horn. We later asked how many mouth pieces get washed every day at the Build Your Own Horn exhibit: Over 300. We’re gonna try and avoid that for ours.
Walk past the Build Your Own Horn exhibit and you may pass right by a dark unassuming semicircle room lined with a couch facing a tv which felt like a small lounge. Think about that: An underused, empty lounge with everyone else outside playing at the exhibits.
Our job is to create an experience which marries sound and motion in a way which makes approaching a musical instrument as smooth a process as possible, a visual ensemble which binds humans to the act of play upon entering the room. In our case the most sensible approach is to position Kinect sensors and projection overhead, ensuring no damage to the equipment or disruption of the intended experience. Given the most common users are children these exhibits see a great amount of use and misuse. With this in mind we’ve planned to create an experience which anyone can enjoy without a great risk of damage to either our equipment or museum visitors.
We arrived at 9:30 armed with a Ben Q and Optoma projector with the intent of measuring the space and testing throw distance from above. We wanted to gain a scope of our projector capabilities before the meeting. A matter of minutes into testing and we see a child walk inside wide-eyed at our feed video. Ben kindly shooed him out and we laughingly told the story later.
At 10:00 on March 31st our team had the pleasure of sitting down with Ben Gondrez – Digital Dome Manager, Ben Griswold – Exhibit Manager, Nick Duarte – Music Curator and Brent Carmack – Associate Director, the main players in our discussion of the function, parameters, application and overall purpose of this installation.
Climb the stairs next to the front door and you’ll reach the Otterbox Digital Dome Theatre, Ben Gondrez’ domain. The Digital Dome showcases international animations on an immersive format, a practice which has accelerated in recent years in place of strictly educational displays.
In a music oriented town such as Fort Collins Nick Duarte is the most knowledgeable of music theory and most passionate about the witnessing the joy moments which comes over those in a trance of musical play.
In the Discovery meeting Ben Griswold illuminated how the combination of the history and the science museums into one entity defines a lot of their legacy and ideology as a hybrid institution, one that can see history from the lens of science and science through the lens of history. This man’s vision is true north in the purpose of FCMoD’s exhibits.
Brent Carmack has overseen projects which characterize the museum as a landmark of Fort Collins such as the FC150, a project which called for submissions of what makes Fort Collins, Fort Collins. His attention to the “what if” questions spoke of his extensive experience with the museum.
Today was our first impression of each party meeting as a group. We set the tone with a few improv exercises to immerse ourselves into a childlike mindset. In the first game one person moves any way they choose and the rest of the group makes onomatopoeias matching with their movements. The second was a game of charades; One person acts out an audio term to the best of their ability and the group guesses the term. This proved to be quite a fitting approach to begin discussing an installation designed to inspire a discussion which ultimately ended up crossing the globe in terms of how human beings interact with sound.
The tone was immediately set as we dove into why this creation is important:
Music can be created in many more ways than traditional instruments, broadening our understanding of the ways that sound can be created as a metaphor for uncovering new possibilities in how to navigate through the sonic environments that are essential to our experience of the world.
The next question is “How can we make this possible?” We began discussion of scope and parameters including technical capabilities. Through overhead Kinect sensors and projection we’re able to capture data from above which can be interpreted in multiple ways: Based on our survey of the space, stakeholders and museum patrons we provided three concepts catering to specific effects on the user, providing sketches illustrating each from different perspectives:
Ripples: Colored ripples represent different expressions of instrumentation allowing users to create compositions. The ability to change the placement and sonic qualities of ripple generators and record your intersections, thus creating loops fosters both individuals and groups to create a wide range of musical forms.
Hopscotch: The room is broken into segments representing musical instruments. You step in and based on your position trigger pitch and frequency. If you stand still long enough lily pads of color light up your position and paths you can jump to. For example: If you’re in the drum section you can hop to the kick drum or snare, building a song as you go.
Mirrors : Mirror uses the same elements as either “Hopscotch” or “Ripples” to create sound with movement. There are three distinct differences: 1. Each patron is represented through a digital abstraction / object to give reference to their spatial movement in the room. 2. The patterns are only represented in the digital space. and 3. The mirrored virtual back wall is a virtual landscape/design that bends, reshapes, and distorts with the music and movement.
Amidst snacks we poured over the three concepts, imagining each detail in formation of our approach. By the end of the day all parties left in rabid anticipation to see this project come to life.
Before leaving we returned to the empty room for final measurements. As we were wrapping up our measurements we heard a small child who had wandered inside say “There’s nothing in here”. He turned as his mother guided him away as we smiled and remarked that that reaction is about to change very quickly.
Matt Maes is a Denver animator focused on immersive and interactive technology. He is Chief Influence Officer of Alt Ethos, Ltdand is also an executive member of the nonprofit organization Denver Arts and Technology Advancement (D.A.T.A.)
Win a cloud! Come drop your business card into the fishbowl in the events space at The Commons and be entered in a drawing to win your very own LED Cloud.
