The variety of projects and installations carried out by Virtalis over the years is tremendous.  Brief details about a wide range of them are given below.

Lowry Art Gallery and Theatre

This project was a complete visualisation of the arts centre inside and out prior to the construction phase. It helped to excite the people of Salford and those further afield to the possibilities of this radical new addition to North Western architecture.

Participants in this virtual world could even “fly” into an LS Lowry picture and experience his work at first hand. The 2D painting, Coming From The Mill (1930), immediately transformed into a 3D world, portraying the stark style of perspective with which Lowry endowed his industrial and street works of art. Texturing of the buildings, streets and sky was achieved by scanning and digitising high quality prints of Lowry masterpieces, ensuring that the process did not lose the brush stroke qualities of the artwork. Lowry characters - the famous “matchstick” people - were then animated, again using digital pre-processing of Lowry prints, but this time separating and moving the characters’ legs to achieve a simple 3-frame textured animation sequence. Groups of moving people were achieved by mapping these textures onto billboards, slowly moving them across the virtual scene.

Millennium Dome

At the planning phase of the Millennium Dome, our real-time interactive, visualisation overcame planning and organisational issues, to ensure timetables were met and all the exhibitors got the best space and ability to present. It was then reused throughout the millennial year as an exhibit in its own right.

Virtual Stonehenge

English Heritage approached Virtalis to produce a high quality virtual record of the stones and their environs in their present state. Whilst emphatically not designed to replace the real thing, the visualisation had to be detailed enough to allow people to "walk" among the stones and experience the different textures in 3D - something the general public is no longer allowed to do. You can even see Sir Christopher Wren’s graffiti!

Various special effects allow Stonehenge to be experienced under different circumstances. The circle can be viewed with a daytime sky, at sunrise and even with an accurate night time sky. Using astronomical tables, this technique was extended to recreate the night sky at any time in the past. In this way, visitors could effectively travel back in time. Other "what if" scenarios are possible. An illustration could be the planned changes to the site, such as the impact of a new Visitors' Centre or the effect of nearby traffic being diverted via a tunnel.

Virtual Archery Demonstrator

Commissioned by Motorola for use on an exhibition stand, Virtalis’ virtual archery system combined VR headset technologies with a composite bow, instrumented with a Polhemus spatial tracking system and transducers measuring bowstring forces when drawn back. The virtual environment we created presented users with a standard archery target within an Olympic class stadium. High-scoring visitors to the Motorola exhibition stand were later invited to prove their virtual archery skills by using the bow to “light” the Olympic flame.

Headlines for other projects

Crime Conquest VR - a PC-based VR “societal trainer”, distributed to up to 300 schools in the Greater Manchester area during the Autumn of 1998. The Laval Virtual Award Winner 1999 was designed for presentation to children of 11 years and older (Key Stage 3+), in keeping with some of the aims of the IT components of the National Curriculum. Co-funded by GMP, Virtalis, The Shrievalty Trust and BNFL, the trainer exploits VR by allowing schoolchildren to “enter the bodies” of different virtual participants: their decisions at crime scenes involving people and property dictate what happens next

Bugs - Insects attack in 3D stereo for launch of Bugs’ Life, The Movie.

Lake Vyrnwy - A 3D stereo movie produced for Severn Trent Water showing how they care for the environment.

National Sea Life Centre - A multi-user headset-based, video playback system for 30 simultaneous users showing a 3D movie about how water is gathered and purified.

BBC Stop the World - A wholly immersive, multi-participant game show developed for BBC Digital.

BBC Relatively Speaking - An immersive final round was developed for this prime time, family game show.

SimWorks Astro Pinball - This new ride film, developed by Stormfront Digital Pictures, was premiered at IAAPA on Virtalis StereoWorks equipment using the StereoServer playback facility.