Festival Art Walk
Wednesday, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public

For one night, festival participants enjoy special access to the artists and scholars behind the festival, who will be on hand to discuss their work. Each exhibition venue will offer beverages and light snacks to ease your journey as you hit the different locales on campus.

Each venue features different works:

• Faculty Projects: Wilson Library, The Pleasants Family Assembly Room
• Faculty Projects: ITS-Manning, RENCI
• Student Projects: The Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence in Graham Memorial, Kresge Foundation Common Room
• Community/Gaming Art: Hanes Art Center, The John and June Alcott Gallery
• Computer Science Initiative Demos: J. Carlyle Sitterson Hall
• Domefest Clips: Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, GlaxoSmithKline Fulldome Theater
• Escapist Theater: Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, NASA Digital Theater

For a list of which projects will be on display at each venue, visit our Exhibitions by Venue page.

In addition to the exhibition venues open throughout the festival week, the Art Walk features a few “guest appearances,” available this one night only:

Domefest:
Domefest is the premier juried festival of the world’s finest and most innovative digital fulldome shows. Morehead visitors will experience the best of Domefest’s 2009 winning entries on a newly revamped planetarium system with super-high-definition 4000-by-4000 pixel resolution, a 5.1 channel digital surround sound system and reconfigured seating for better sight lines. Fulldome digital video creates an immersive environment in which each visitor is surrounded by the sights and sounds of the planetarium show.

Escapist Theater:
The Escapist is a leading video gaming destination founded in 2005 offering video game enthusiasts high-quality, innovative and exclusive content. The Escapist captures and celebrates the contemporary video gaming lifestyle and the diverse global video game culture by way of in-depth features, thought-provoking articles and relevant columns authored by leading video game authorities, as well as cutting-edge video shorts, engaging forums and robust social media elements that incorporate the video gaming experience. During the Art Walk, Escapist Theater will feature video clips and shorts on the theme of gaming. Scroll down to see some clips made available by the magazine.

Avatars, Pits & Virtual Symphonies and Painting
Computer scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will demo a number of—we can’t think of another phrase for it—really cool projects. (Who hasn’t wanted to try out virtual reality?) Here’s a list of the projects you can experience at Sitterson Hall:

• Animatronic Shader Lamps Avatars: While this project was originally developed for medical purposes, tonight’s avatars will focus on lighter content—comedy. Using cameras and projectors to map the dynamic motion and appearance of a real person onto a humanoid animatronic model, this demo will allow CHAT participants to engage with an avatar.
• The Walking Experiment and the Pit: Don a virtual reality headset and test your skills dropping balls onto targets and see if you can triumph over The Pit. Will you manage to step off the ledge?
• Virtual Symphonies: Ming Lin (UNC computer science) and her team developed a touch-enabled virtual instrument system that emulates musical instruments, including the xylophone, drums, Chinese gong, keyboards and more. A multi-touch table developed by RENCI is the input device for users to play the virtual instruments, using their hands in an intuitive way as they typically would with the real musical instruments.
• Virtual Painting: Choose your brush, mix your colors and paint a virtual masterpiece using the dAb virtual painting system. “dAb” provides the user with the traditional tools of a painter,  allowing the user to control a virtual brush as he or she would a real brush. This project explores the benefits of recreating the “sight, touch, action and feeling” of the artistic process itself. 
  

Below are clips from The Escapist online gaming magazine like those that will be featured at Escapist Theater. Please note that this video contains mature content.