Category Archives: Events / Conferences

Events / Conferences

Wadi Al Helo VR – A Virtual Visit to a Cultural Heritage | Kultur und Informatik 2019, VWH Verlag, Berlin

Wadi Al Helo VR – A Virtual Visit to a Cultural Heritage (pp. 93–100) documents the full research arc of a VR project exploring the historic valley of Wadi al Helo in Sharjah, UAE. The publication outlines the project’s context, methods, and results, offering a citable reference for future teaching, replication, and cross-institutional collaboration.

Developed collaboratively, the work demonstrates how immersive technologies can support cultural heritage preservation while providing reusable research pipelines—from field capture and modeling to narrative assembly and dissemination. These workflows contribute to curriculum development, student capstones, and collaborative projects.

The publication also reinforces the integration of research into teaching and scholarship, validating methods through peer review and enabling broader access through partnerships with universities, festivals, and cultural institutions.
Read the publication here

Events / Conferences, Exhibitions

Storytelling in VR – Wadi Al Helo

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Wadi al Helo, arabic for sweet valley, is located in the eastern area of the Emirate of Sharjah. The valley with its historic village and several watchtowers plays an important role in the history of the Emirate, and as a cultural heritage site for the whole United Arab Emirates. As part of ‘Sharjah’s Gateway to Trucial States’ project (SGTS) the site is part of Sharjah’s bid to be included with seven more emirate cultural heritage sites on the prestigious list of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

The Wadi Al Helo project is a collaborative research project between the American University of Sharjah (College of Architecture, Art and Design), University of the Arts Berlin (Germany), and New York Universities NTSI Lab initiated by Prof. Zlatan Filipovic with the goal to develop several installations that feature the stories of the valley using different media, and to support Sharjah’s SGTS project.

Storytelling with Virtual Reality: A virtual reality (VR) application was developed by Zlatan Filipovic (AUS), Pablo Dornhege (UdK), and Felix H. Beck (NYUAD) from June–September 2018 and presented on September 25 (6–8pm) at the American University of Sharjah (Media studio: AD1-104, Small gallery: AD1-101). The showcased framework supports immersive storytelling about Wadi al Helo, featuring several historic watchtowers, the archaeological remains of a village, and the wadi itself protected by surrounding mountains. “A significant example of a naturally protected agricultural valley within mountains. It is reached through a riverbed or valley, along the caravan route, with watchtowers located at the entrance of the valley to protect from raiders. It was safe territory, allowing people to work in agriculture and export their products to coastal areas.”

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Events / Conferences

17. Sarajevo Film Festival

3,218 Comments

As an accredited film professional @ SFF I had an opportunity to see Panorama program films curated by Howard Feinstein, film critic and its programmer. This time around he prepared a special tribute to Lucrecia Martel (Argentina) and presented a selection of her beautiful film works. Specially organized Q&A sessions enabled for an open conversation and friendly suggestions/recommendations by the filmmaker herself to the Sarajevo audience in the Meeting Point Cinema.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0551506/

Events / Conferences, Exhibitions, Workshops

Roaming Images – workshop+exhibition

3,170 Comments

Maraya Art Centar, Al Qasba, Sharjah, UAE

This project is a collaboration with the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art of Greece and the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Greece.

The workshop took place from 12-14 June 2011, 6-9PM  at the Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah with participation of 10 invited artists and other scholars.
An exhibition followed on 22 June.

This is a first event of a project which aims to re-define, through the use of images, their relation of the cultural heritage of the Arabic peninsula and the Eastern Mediterranean region. This traveling project, will open first during the Thessalonoki Biennale on 18 September 2011 and will travel to other places in the Middle East.


Roaming Images Workshop – record_v1 from zlatan filipovic on Vimeo.

Events / Conferences

FMX11 Stuttgart

1,043 Comments

http://www.fmx.de/
http://www.fmx.de/media/live-streaming.html

FMX11
16th Conference on Animation, Effects, Games
and Interactive Media

It has been quite refreshing to attend a conference like this.
FMX brings a nice balance of presentations both from profession and education. It is also amazing to see so many young people, mainly students @ the conference. This clearly demonstrates the energy and potential impact on the development of the new professional in the fields of Animation, Interactive media and Gaming.

FMX places special focus on educators and organizes a fair of animation training schools and programs as well as industry technology leaders.

Special sessions on promoting recruitment for leading world animation studios take place every day. SIGGRAPH specials, Flashforward conference content, forums on technology, workflow and pipeline analysis of big titles like Rango, Rio, Tangled by Dreamworks, ILM and Pixar, Disney Studios, UBIsoft and others are running from 9.30am to 8pm.

In parallel to FMX11 there is a 18. Internationales Trickfilm Festival (itfs.de) with its amazing selections from art/animations from round the globe.

It is overwhelming and I am enjoying it so much. The same is expected from the last two days of the conference too!