For the last few months Noho have been getting their digital hands dirty with a massive model of Ancient Rome.

Rome Reborn is an international project based at the University of Virginia, which aims to create a digital model illustrating the entire urban development of ancient Rome. Its director Bernie Frischer asked us to get some nice HD video out of it. The model is a massive 600 million polygons – for those of you who live in the real world, that’s pretty big! The project has been ongoing for some time (since 1997, in fact) but these renders added elements never included before: some people, some dirt, smoke and some of the latest models from Bernie’s modelling team.

The statistics in terms of data and rendering were astronomical, worthy of Ancient Rome itself, but Klemens managed the monster as efficiently and smartly as we would expect from him. Rendering was a massive task and used up all our machines for a good while, as render farms across the world shuddered at the sight of such a massive data set.

Another interesting boast, we hooked up Louis’ (aged 9, one of our youngest member’s of staff) Kinect to the machine for some motion capture. Klemens (Austria’s answer to Russell Crowe) created a gladiator sequence which is used in the Colosseum shot. For those of you interested in geurrilla-style motion capture we did a lot of fiddling around to get it going but once it was up it took about an hour. The rest of the motion capture was supplied by our friends in GV2 in Trinity who kindly donated some walk and talk sequences.

Overall, we’re delighted with the results and the footage we created will be used for a touring show around Europe on Roman Technology. It was a truly international experience: an Austrian working for an Irish company in Dublin creating shots of Ancient Rome for an American client, and supplying them to a Dutch company for a tour of Holland, Belgium and Germany!

Next up on this project is to create a DVD Rom, iPad and iPhone versions, wish us luck!

In November of last year, during The Innovation Dublin Project, we undertook our first major outdoor building projection project. Located at the back of the Convention Centre in Spencer Dock and measuring almost 60m across, the Art Park is Ireland’s largest outdoor projection screen.

In conjunction with Sarah Owens and the Sebastian Guinness Gallery, the curators of the space, we created a 5-minute loop designed to bring the building to life. Traditionally this type of projection would be done on a building with lots of architectural features, so for the first time for us, having a completely flat, blank surface to project on, proved to be a creative challenge! We also faced the challenge of a tight deadline, which gave us very little time to experiment with what looked well on the wall. In spite of this the animation ran successfully for a week over the Innovation Dublin Festival, and now is used as the holding loop for the Art Park between projects.

This month we were commissioned again by the Art Park for a poetry project called Hearts Loop. The loop consists of ten different poems themed around love for Valentine’s Day. We were commissioned to give each of these poems a distinctive look, while still maintaining the coherence of the overall piece. Both were fantastic projects to work on and continue Noho’s expanding experience of large area projections. After the 60m expanse of this one, it’s hard to see how they can get much bigger!

Hearts Loop will run for the next 4 weeks between 5pm and midnight at the back of the Convention Centre on Spencer dock. if you can see the Luas line, you’re in the right place!

So we have at last moved into our newly refurbished home. Gone are the days of our ground-floor fishbowl office, with citizens of Dublin stopping to peer in at us through the day (the effect of which was somewhere between a live reality show about a start-up and a dreary art installation). We’re now up in the lofty heights of an old building on South William Street, working away on our latest projects. The new offices will suit the way we like to work, like monks of old, a mixture of communal creative living and blissful contemplative solitude.

Our favorite cameraman Nico Vermeulen is also on the move within the building. Nico will soon be moving his rostrum and motion-control rig from the basement to a new spacious studio upstairs. This will be a more permanent studio for him and Saskia; a dedicated space for their work that will be client-friendly and well-equipped with new lights and gizmos.

In other news, Breffni O’Malley of Silver City fame has recently become a full card-carrying member of the Noho team. This is a great boost to us – Breffni brings research, narrative design, instructional design and writing expertise into the fold. He’ll also look after the website side of things, following on from the great work done in Silver City. We’ve worked closely with Breffni on many previous projects, and this move strengthens what Noho can offer across a range of areas. Breffni will fill you in more himself soon with a blog post on the work he’s up to.

Despite the move and changes, we’ve been busy with lots of exciting projects and have picked up some great press coverage in recent weeks. Saturday’s Irish Times gave us a big spread on the app we developed for the City Walls ( see previous post ). Here’s a link to the article. Our app raced up the charts to number 9 overall and number 1 in the education section as a result.. We also featured in an article for the Italian National Geographic magazine (link). We received a Silver award in the DMAs a couple of weeks ago and before Christmas were nominated for various awards including an Appy, a Spider and an Irish Web award.

Next week we are off to Rome again for the launch of Vmust, a European Network of Excellence for Virtual Heritage. We are frantically putting together the promo video and website for it at the moment……..standby for more news on that in a while.

Dublin hiptsters beware, Noho have jumped on the iPhone/iPad bandwagon and finished their first app. The app is available in the app store and you will find a thorough description here. We were commissioned by Dublin City Council to create this app, re-purposing content we had created for the Medieval Dublin Project . As it was our first iPhone app, we took our time at it. It looks pretty cool so far, but we will make some improvements to it throughout the year, and we would love to hear some feedback.

John set about developing the application working from some wireframe sketches rattled out on a long journey to China. Dara worked away on the design with Niall interfering here and there. We design and create content for a wide range of different media so making a switch to iPhone wasn’t a major leap. In fact our experience in both video and interactive design gave us the skills to immediately get some working models done quite quickly. From a design point of view, we had to ease off on the ‘ye-olde’ look of the medieval dublin project, but not go too cold or clinical as a City Council signage strategy. We also found that clarity at such a small scale is an issue, so problems need to be figured out in terms of scale even when you have the facility to pinch in.

Video and file-size was also an issue. The app is quite large (at 85mbs) and we agreed early on that the video should be contained within the app so that if using it on the street, the user is not streaming video, particularly if they are a visitor at the mercy of roaming rates. So it’s a little heavy on the initial download.

We have been doing the location-based before and after video clips for many years on the Medieval Dublin project and were always looking at ways of showing the video at the actual location. The iPhone’s video and GPS functionality enabled us to do this in a nice little interface. From a usability point of view we wanted to get across the before and after simulations as best as we could. These are a little tricky because you need to stand in a specific spot that is different to the actual hotspot. We solved this by creating a different icon on the GPS interface specifically for the before and after sequence.

Another feature of the App shows a high resolution image of Dublin in 1500. The image is packed full of historical detail taken from our work with experts on the Medieval Project and is an great way of exploring the medieval city (go and see the Dublinia exhibition if you get a chance for the real thing).

So, go and buy it, it’s only 3 euro and if you have time, give us some feedback, or even better, give it a good review and tell your friends.

So we made it back from Shanghai in one piece, where we created and installed some AV content for the Irish pavilion at Expo 2010. We really enjoyed the experience, there was a lot of hard work and we tried our best to take in what we could of this amazing city. The Pavilion building itself, designed by Des Byrne in OPW, is amazing. It’s a beautiful design and is positioned ideally on the main thoroughfare beside Turkey and Germany and Iceland, of course. 10,000 people a day are moving through this pavilion, most of whom don’t know much or anything about Ireland, so it is a great showcase for the country. We learnt a lot working on this type of project and have ranked up some new ridiculous resolutions and formats (see previous blog). A great experience overall and a great chance to work and hang out with the good people of Martello Media.

Now that we are back we are about to launch the second edition of Medieval Dublin. It’s ready to go to press and check out here for the latest on the website. Dublinia launched their new exhibition which features some of the content from the DVDs. In other medieval news, John, Dara and myself are jumping on the iPhone app bandwagon and designing an app for the Medieval City Walls. It features content from the Medieval Dublin Project and will be our first foray into the App business. It’s looking good so far and we will keep you posted on how we get on.

The Innovation Dublin video is online now and we are hoping to do something special for this years festival. In the meantime, Dara, John and Brefni are working away on the website.

Nico Vermeulen is our favourite cameraman, and we are delighted to announce that he is now a resident in our basement where he has set up his Rostrum and Motion Control Rig. The Motion control rig is called a ‘penguin’ and is a very versatile piece of kit. We will post up some more detailed information on this in the next few weeks.

We’ve also completed work on the National Leprechaun Museum. We created high-resolution video content for a 4 minute sequence on Ireland’s mythical landscape which was designed to project on a circular centre-piece of a relief map of Ireland made in maple wood. Our cosmic designer Dara, designed and animated the entire sequence. We also provided visuals for the ‘Bronze Room’ which is a 4-projector-360degree-moving panoramic projecting onto a copper surface. Again the subject matter was Irish Mythology and Folklore, and once again Dara (a true Fairy) designed and produced this piece with the help of some 3D. There is also a wishing well with interactive watery simulations (created by magic John)  that will be installed over the summer.

It’s nearly a year since Noho Limited was established and so far, we have had a busy and exciting year. We’ve done some great work already and look forward to further interesting projects over the coming months.

The beginning of 2009, saw us delivering the RTE News Backgrounds (See more in our case studies section) whilst painting our new office, borrowing furniture (thanks Puca), and setting up machines and people, and of course, getting to know the locals (Peter’s Pub).

Niall and Danielle pretend they are newsworthy

MyCity (see the case studies section) was a major concern for us over the year. We are delighted with the result and proud of our achievement; 42 Films, a 3d model of Dublin, an interactive floor, a timeline Dublin kiosk and a hurried install to get it ready for the Innovation Dublin festival. We will blog about some of our own innovations in this project when we get a chance.

Medieval Dublin (the General Edition) was also an ongoing project throughout the year and we will be delivering the new version in the next couple of months. The project was very well received at a conference in Seville in June and at an exhibition in Italy in November. It now has international recognition as an innovative and original project. Have a look at the website www.medievaldublin.ie or check out our Christmas Card from us at www.medievaldublin.ie/xmas. The card was a silverlight project and John Lynch has a blog at www.john-lynch.org that goes through some of the process.

Other work included some effects work on Corduroy, a short film for Hugh O’Connor, a GAA promo for RTE, a promo for RedBee Media on GOLD, 4 character-driven Spar Ads, and various bits and pieces to keep us on our toes. In December and January of this year we delivered a DVD and website for the Draft Development Plan for DCC. Check out the nice work at www.dublincitydevelopmentplan.ie.

As always, we worked closely with Breffni in Silver City and he managed to get married along the way, whilst finishing Innovation Dublin and MyCity.

This Blog will be devoted to us showing off the great and wonderful things we do in the office in Noho. Over the coming months we’ll be blogging about different aspects of the projects we are working on, so let the waffle begin…….