Creation of a sensory room for Diana Gurtskaya's Center for Social Integration
IT GROUP OPEN created a sensory room for the Diana Gurtskaya Center for Social Integration.
In September 2022, the Diana Gurtskaya Center for Social Integration opened its doors in a new building, and one of the highlights here was a sensory room, which was created by our specialists. Its task is to make work with creatively gifted children and young people with disabilities more effective, interesting and exciting. Audiovisual interactive solutions applied in this project made the room one of the places of attraction for visitors of the center.
A sensory room is a specially organized environment that is designed to stimulate different perception systems of visitors, to influence their senses and feelings. Such stimulation helps in development, including creative development. Therefore, the sensory room has become an important element of the Center for Social Integration in the new building, a developmental space for children who will be able to develop their creative talents and abilities to the fullest. The room can also be used directly for classes, such as vocal or drawing lessons. The task before the engineers of IT GROUP OPEN was set for the fall of 2021.
“We looked at all sorts of ideas for filling the sensory room,” says Vladimir Rozin, the company's CEO. - There were many ideas, from the most fantastic to the very simple, but they were all united by the idea of making interaction with the room really exciting for the children who enter it. In the end, we chose a fairly complex but interesting concept and started thinking about how to put it into practice. The design and planning process was long - it took several months. But the approach fully justified itself.
The main object of the room is a large screen with unusual proportions - it is ultra-wide. The image on it is formed by two powerful projectors, the picture of which must be perfectly stitched together so that there are no gaps or overlaps. This creates the effect of infinite space. Plus surround sound system, built so that it is felt evenly in any point of the room (this was achieved thanks to the ceiling placement of loudspeakers). Sounds here are transformed into images, and human movements, especially with hands - into sounds. For example, if a visitor sings or plays a musical instrument, the color on the screen changes, hand movements generate music, and simple drawings on a tablet are transformed on the screen into almost artistic canvases. Another element of the system is “drums”, playing on which you can get a variety of sounds to which the color design of the screen responds.
“The acoustic system is built in such a way as not only to provide uniform coverage over the entire area, but also to get surround sound at every point,” says Mikhail Basyuk, sound and lighting engineer at IT GROUP OPEN. - A lot of sound sources arranged in a special order perfectly help in this. Also, due to the fact that two walls are occupied by a huge canvas screen, the third wall has beautiful abstract images, and the fourth wall consists almost entirely of windows, the only option for placement was to use cabinet ceiling speakers. Of course, to form a tight sound, we couldn't help but use a subwoofer. We hid it so that no one would ever see it. Even the acceptance committee couldn't find it until they called us. The digital mixing console controls the sound of the system and corrects it. We also wrote our own control system for it.
The system of turning movements into sounds and images on the screen is based on a bunch of five Kinect touchless touch controllers, which transmit data to a computer with the TouchDesigner visual development environment installed, allowing to create interactive virtual environments (here the data from the sensors are transformed into visual images).
In the course of implementation we had to overcome some natural limitations of Kinect. The thing is that the manufacturer guarantees stable operation of controllers with a cable length of no more than 2 meters, but in this case it was necessary to lay longer cables - up to 5 meters. And the problems really did not take long to appear - there was no stable work. The solution was found: we wrote our own Kinect control scripts, which monitor the sensors and reboot them if stability problems are detected. It's also possible to force reboot the devices, as well as customize them. Thanks to this set of scripts, the final visual picture shows the current state of the sensors, and it is immediately clear whether they are working or not.
This technology made it possible to realize a variety of interactive interaction schemes. Visitors especially liked the “scatter sheets”, which react to people's hand movements by flying apart.
The process of “stitching” two projectors together to obtain a continuous and wide (two walls with a semicircular transition from one to the other) picture was also a technical challenge. Panasonic projectors with ultra-wide angle lenses were used. “These are excellent in technical characteristics, but quite complicated in operation, especially in our case, when they are used two in one bundle on a semicircular wall, - emphasizes Vladimir Rozin. - The light falls in such a way that it emphasizes all the irregularities of the surface, and we had to struggle with this factor. Once the whole process had to start over. But the result was worth the effort: a beautiful wide-angle picture that takes your breath away.
A separate issue was the choice of flooring. Here, too, many options were considered, from simple carpeting to a mirror floor (which was abandoned in favor of durability and maintainability). However, a simple carpet would have been too boring, so a fluorescent flooring was added. Ultraviolet lights are deployed around the perimeter of the room, bringing the floor to life.
Another important aspect that the specialists worked on was the ease of use of the sensory room with all its technically complex equipment. For this purpose, an automatic control system for the entire complex was implemented, which allows simplifying the management and making it accessible to non-specialists. Now a simple and brief instruction is enough to work with the room's tools.
The full term of the project was one year, but most of this period was taken up by the preparatory stage, concept development, 3D-modeling plus subsequent fine-tuning and adjustments. The installation and customization of the equipment itself took about 4 months.
IT GROUP OPEN created a sensory room for the Diana Gurtskaya Center for Social Integration.
In September 2022, the Diana Gurtskaya Center for Social Integration opened its doors in a new building, and one of the highlights here was a sensory room, which was created by our specialists. Its task is to make work with creatively gifted children and young people with disabilities more effective, interesting and exciting. Audiovisual interactive solutions applied in this project made the room one of the places of attraction for visitors of the center.
A sensory room is a specially organized environment that is designed to stimulate different perception systems of visitors, to influence their senses and feelings. Such stimulation helps in development, including creative development. Therefore, the sensory room has become an important element of the Center for Social Integration in the new building, a developmental space for children who will be able to develop their creative talents and abilities to the fullest. The room can also be used directly for classes, such as vocal or drawing lessons. The task before the engineers of IT GROUP OPEN was set for the fall of 2021.
“We looked at all sorts of ideas for filling the sensory room,” says Vladimir Rozin, the company's CEO. - There were many ideas, from the most fantastic to the very simple, but they were all united by the idea of making interaction with the room really exciting for the children who enter it. In the end, we chose a fairly complex but interesting concept and started thinking about how to put it into practice. The design and planning process was long - it took several months. But the approach fully justified itself.
The main object of the room is a large screen with unusual proportions - it is ultra-wide. The image on it is formed by two powerful projectors, the picture of which must be perfectly stitched together so that there are no gaps or overlaps. This creates the effect of infinite space. Plus surround sound system, built so that it is felt evenly in any point of the room (this was achieved thanks to the ceiling placement of loudspeakers). Sounds here are transformed into images, and human movements, especially with hands - into sounds. For example, if a visitor sings or plays a musical instrument, the color on the screen changes, hand movements generate music, and simple drawings on a tablet are transformed on the screen into almost artistic canvases. Another element of the system is “drums”, playing on which you can get a variety of sounds to which the color design of the screen responds.
“The acoustic system is built in such a way as not only to provide uniform coverage over the entire area, but also to get surround sound at every point,” says Mikhail Basyuk, sound and lighting engineer at IT GROUP OPEN. - A lot of sound sources arranged in a special order perfectly help in this. Also, due to the fact that two walls are occupied by a huge canvas screen, the third wall has beautiful abstract images, and the fourth wall consists almost entirely of windows, the only option for placement was to use cabinet ceiling speakers. Of course, to form a tight sound, we couldn't help but use a subwoofer. We hid it so that no one would ever see it. Even the acceptance committee couldn't find it until they called us. The digital mixing console controls the sound of the system and corrects it. We also wrote our own control system for it.
The system of turning movements into sounds and images on the screen is based on a bunch of five Kinect touchless touch controllers, which transmit data to a computer with the TouchDesigner visual development environment installed, allowing to create interactive virtual environments (here the data from the sensors are transformed into visual images).
In the course of implementation we had to overcome some natural limitations of Kinect. The thing is that the manufacturer guarantees stable operation of controllers with a cable length of no more than 2 meters, but in this case it was necessary to lay longer cables - up to 5 meters. And the problems really did not take long to appear - there was no stable work. The solution was found: we wrote our own Kinect control scripts, which monitor the sensors and reboot them if stability problems are detected. It's also possible to force reboot the devices, as well as customize them. Thanks to this set of scripts, the final visual picture shows the current state of the sensors, and it is immediately clear whether they are working or not.
This technology made it possible to realize a variety of interactive interaction schemes. Visitors especially liked the “scatter sheets”, which react to people's hand movements by flying apart.
The process of “stitching” two projectors together to obtain a continuous and wide (two walls with a semicircular transition from one to the other) picture was also a technical challenge. Panasonic projectors with ultra-wide angle lenses were used. “These are excellent in technical characteristics, but quite complicated in operation, especially in our case, when they are used two in one bundle on a semicircular wall, - emphasizes Vladimir Rozin. - The light falls in such a way that it emphasizes all the irregularities of the surface, and we had to struggle with this factor. Once the whole process had to start over. But the result was worth the effort: a beautiful wide-angle picture that takes your breath away.
A separate issue was the choice of flooring. Here, too, many options were considered, from simple carpeting to a mirror floor (which was abandoned in favor of durability and maintainability). However, a simple carpet would have been too boring, so a fluorescent flooring was added. Ultraviolet lights are deployed around the perimeter of the room, bringing the floor to life.
Another important aspect that the specialists worked on was the ease of use of the sensory room with all its technically complex equipment. For this purpose, an automatic control system for the entire complex was implemented, which allows simplifying the management and making it accessible to non-specialists. Now a simple and brief instruction is enough to work with the room's tools.
The full term of the project was one year, but most of this period was taken up by the preparatory stage, concept development, 3D-modeling plus subsequent fine-tuning and adjustments. The installation and customization of the equipment itself took about 4 months.
