The Centre for Digital Media is pleased to announce that MDM alumni have recently won two prestigious awards—a Bronze Pencil from The One Show 2020 Awards and an Award of Excellence and Innovation in the Integration of Technology from the CNIE 2020 Awards.

It’s always thrilling to see MDM alumni work being recognized around the world!

Tangible Interaction’s One Show Award

A group of alumni working at Tangible Interaction were the recipients of a Bronze Pencil from The One Show 2020 Awards.

Alumni Mark Olson was the lead and the project included alumni Karl Kim and Conrad Sly on the original project as well as Hector Alzate and Gabriel Reis with the following installations of the same project in Japan and Spain.

The team won for Galaxy Graffiti, a digital graffiti 3D experience using Samsung S10 phones to paint on a 10 meter wide LED screen in Samsung’s Experience Store in London. The experience was also installed in Samsung’s Experience Stores in Tokyo and Valencia.

The award is a sought after achievement for agencies worldwide. From the award website: "The One Show is the world's most prestigious award show in advertising, design and digital marketing...The One Show has had a rich legacy of honoring some of the most groundbreaking ideas, created by some of the most remarkable minds in creativity."

Project Manager Mark Olson explains the project:

Cheil Worldwide, the agency for Samsung, came to us after seeing a previous project we did for Panorama Music Festival, a large-scale graffiti experience that stretched 18 metres. Samsung was launching an experience-based concept store in London, UK and installing a large 10-metre wide, curved LED screen to be the centrepiece of the store. They wanted to create a graffiti experience on the massive screen using their new S10 phones.

Over the course of six months, we developed this system with these features:

• Life-size 3D canvas/environment for customers to paint on, designed from real locations in the different cities we installed the experience.
• Animations of these life size 3D environments to make them come to life while resetting the experience for new customers.
• Integrating our system with motion tracking cameras to track a device in real-time in a 3D space.
• Worked with local graffiti artists to digitize their artwork and add it to the 3D environments.
• Created a phone app that communicates with our software for customers to use to pick colours, change nozzle types, and share their artwork.
• Designed a phone case in the style of a spray can that integrates the motion tracking hardware and has a real push button nozzle to paint digitally with.
• Added real life sounding spray sound and spray can shaking noise to the phone and phone case.
• Lastly, we installed and integrated our software and hardware on different massive LED screens.

This experience was part of the brand’s push to create experience-driven stores to show how their products are used in unique ways. This push was a way to connect with their customers in a new way. Galaxy Graffiti was so successful in London that we also installed it in Tokyo and Valencia with potential for future locations.

Our team put tons of energy and time into the innovation of all the different components to this experience–realistic painting on 3D objects and design and integration of motion tracking phone cases. We put in all of this effort to enjoy the customer’s amazement, but it is great to also be recognized by the creative industry.

MDM Team Holocopter’s CNIE Award

An MDM student team project Holocopter won this year’s Award of Excellence and Innovation in Technology Integration from the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education. This award "recognizes innovative work on the effective integration of new or existing technology in a learning context."

Project Manager Junsong Zhang explains the project:

With a team of 6 and our faculty supervisor Patrick Pennefather, we developed a Microsoft HoloLens application for BCIT’s School of Transportation’s Aircraft Maintenance Engineer program. The application has been published in the Microsoft Store successfully and is currently being used by BCIT for both teaching and research purposes.

We were pleasantly surprised that our project received this prestigious national award, and looking back there are some reasons why we think our 3-month project was recognized in this way. First, it was a significant project for BCIT—it was cutting-edge in the field of education and difficult to design and implement from a learning perspective. And second, we enabled the client to use the application for teaching and research, instead of delivering a working prototype and ending the project there. In addition:

• We over-delivered with a multiple-user function allowing both student and teacher different entry points into the HoloLens application.
• We published the application in the Microsoft Store packaging everything according to Microsoft standards.
• We helped the client install the application at BCIT after the project ended and after we had graduated.
• We made a video to re-cap the entire project for BCIT to promote the "future of education".

The dedication and support of the entire team inspired BCIT’s lead stakeholder James Rout (Associate Vice-President, Education Support and Innovation at BCIT) to integrate the application into their Transport Canada and Canadian Council for Aviation and Aerospace certified Aircraft Maintenance Engineer program. We are proud of our work and happy that it supports teaching and learning for one of our four partner institutions.