Sauter, Joachim; Lüsebrink, Dirk
«Invisible Shape of Things Past»

«‹Invisible Shape of Things Past› is an exploration into representing film in virtual space and navigating through time in VR.
The project enables users to transform film sequences into interactive virtual objects. This transformation is bases on all the camera parameters of a particular film swquence (movement, perspective, focal length). [...] To ‹play the movie,› the user activates the front side of the object, whereas a doubleclick leads the user along the virtual camera path through the object. Dragging the mouse to the left or right makes the movie run forward or backward. [...] In a second step, we developed a spatial and timebased organization concept for the film objects. Since a time as well as a place exists for the occurrence of each film sequence, we modeled a virtual representation of the place of occurrence for each object, thus enabling the user to navigate through time. Taking the city of Berlin as an example, we modeled all the urban situations since 1900, and positioned the film objects according to their place and the time of shooting.»
Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lüsebrink

(quoted from: Jeffrey Shaw/Peter Weibel (eds), Future Cinema. The cinematic Imaginary after Film, exhib. Cat., Cambridge, MA/ London, 2003, p. 466f.)