Cirque du Soleil
An interactive musical rave in Madrid and a super cool bar in Las Vegas — working with the creative team at Cirque was incredibly rewarding.
Conductors
Conductors was an attraction for SamaSama, an interactive audiovisual theme park full of attractions where players interact in groups to create music. In Conductors, 42 players work together to conduct a choral piece. Each player is given a conductor’s baton with an accelerometer embedded in it; they are then given cues for motions on a giant projection screen situated in front of them. As each player successfully hits their cue, their part of the choir sings it part — and when they miss, their part falls silent.
Fountain
The Fountain is the city square of SamaSama, an interactive audiovisual theme park full of attractions where players interact in groups to create music. It is a free flow attraction that can support interactions of up to 50 people. As soon as players enter the floor, they are tracked by infrared cameras overhead and assigned a marker. The game encourages the players to gather in groups to form the vertices of geometric shapes, causing unexpected scenes to take place and pleasant music that synchronizes with all of the other attractions.
Revolution Lounge
Revolutionary in design, The Beatles Revolution Lounge takes guests on an evolutionary journey, where both music and interior transform, creating a psychedelic sensory environment. The first nightlife experience created by Cirque du Soleil, Revolution blends cutting-edge interactive design, art and sound in a contemporary interpretation of The Beatles era at The Mirage in Las Vegas. Guests are encouraged to add their own creativity to the ultra-lounge’s décor. “The inspiration for Revolution began with The Beatles’ message of love, but the atmosphere is a modern twist on their era of freedom, self-expression and free-love,” said Jean-Francois Bouchard, Senior Director of Creation, Cirque du Soleil Experience.
The rich psychedelic experience generated by this installation was created by SDF as the centerpiece of an interactive scenario designed and produced by Virtango for Cirque du Soleil.
The Beatles Revolution Bar
01.10.07 By Stuart Miles
Las Vegas Review
The Las Vegas bar goes high tech with its interactive coffee tables
At a glance
What is it? Interactive coffee table
Price – $200 bar bill
The good – The interactivity, the colours, the concept
The bad – It was quite hard to draw anything that wasn’t psychedelic, regardless of age you’ll need ID
We say – Eight impressed journalists and 3 hours of playing says it all
Full review
10 January 2007 – When Arthur C Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” in 1961 he probably had the Revolution Bar which opened 2 weeks ago in the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas in mind.
Inspired by the spirit of The Beatles and created by Cirque du Soleil, The Beatles REVOLUTION LOUNGE is exciting to gadget lovers not because it’s The Beatles, but because of its coffee tables.
No we haven’t gone mad, but when you gather eight UK technology journalists covering CES 2007 around a table in a bar with the promise of free booze (courtesy of Hi-Fi makers Denon) you don’t expect them to spend the next 3 hours doing nothing else but playing with the table.
Why? Because it was technology so magical it was a wonder to be seen.
The premise was simple. Psychedelic patterns ranging from flowers to love hearts to rainbows would appear on the table whenever you touched it like an interactive Etch-A-Sketch. Once drawn, and all the patterns moved and swayed – some even had moving jelly fish, you were given the choice of deleting the image or saving it to another part of the table.
Every so often a master of ceremonies would appear and view our images (he had magic rings on his fingers) and then ones that he liked where somehow fired on to a wall for all to see.
A bottle of Grey Goose later and we were all so amazed that we still aren’t sure how it works although both Philips and HP have demoed similar devices in the past as concepts.
VERDICT
We don’t get wowed too often here at Pocket-lint, we weren’t part of the standing ovation at the keynote at MacWorld for the launch at the iPhone – we were too busy bringing you the news, but this has to be the coolest thing we’ve seen at the CES 2007 so far, and no it wasn’t the Vodka talking.
If you are in Vegas this is definitely one to check out, but make sure you’ve got ID, the bouncers even carded the over 50s in our group.