Gravity Sketch Oculus Rift virtual reality and Imperial College Advanced Hackspace at the Tate

Tate Britain education team hosted a really interesting ‘Digital Artists show and tell’ event in the Tate Taylor Digital Studio 15/07/15.

The event showcased the work of the Imperial College Advanced Hackspace (https://icah.org.uk) and Gravity Sketch (http://gravitysketch.com) a Computer Aided Design (CAD) modeling app. There was also an opportunity to try out the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, which was a first for me and it’d be great to explore this more with arts students & staff at UAL/CCW.

The event was free & open to all to drop in at any point in the afternoon and Tate plan to host more of these types of events in the future.

Is was a great opportunity to make some very useful connections and see some very interesting digital work. There’s plenty of potential to follow up on some collaborations ideas with our arts students & staff at UAL/CCW and the Imperial College Advanced Hackspace and Gravity Sketch teams.

The session kicked off by Larissa Kunstel-Tabet and the ICAH project team with an introduction to Imperial College Advanced Hackspace (ICAH) https://icah.org.uk who’s doing great work in embedding cross-disciplinary digital making practices with staff and students at Imperial. ICA Hackspace is also keen to collaborate with other institutions like the Tate and HEIs. Hopefully we can explore this more with arts students & staff at UAL/CCW in the work we are doing around linking the Makerspace movement and maker culture with current 'CCW Digital Learning, Teaching & Enhancement' work at UAL: See CCW Digital Makerspace and Chelsea Jam.  

Daniela Paredes Fuentes and the research team developing CAD modeling using augmented reality introduced us to Gravity Sketch. (see video above). This work has led them to develop an amazing new app called Gravity Sketch, which enables a very accessible, quick and easy way into CAD modeling. 3D renders can be easily developed on tablet device and exported (Using https://sketchfab.com/) and developed in other software for 3d printing, animations, CAD work etc.

This app will be of great interest to arts students & staff at UAL/CCW and we look forward to exploring this more with the Gravity Sketch team.

The Gravity Sketch team also demonstrated how some of the Gravity Sketch models had been used to create a virtual reality world experienced through the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. This was a first for me and again another area for us to engage UAL arts students & staff in as part of creative practice.

Learn more about CCW Digital Learning Teaching and Enhancement