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May 17, 2004
Touring Hong Kong's Cyberport
Our morning began with a tour of Cyberport, Hong Kong's new state-of-the-art information technology campus. Occupying the beautiful southwest coastline of Hong Kong Island, Cyberport is intended to be a high-tech town dedicated to developing the region's ICT sector. Our hotel, the Meridien Cyberport, is part of the campus, all of it networked with wireless Internet access and a mobile telephone network (the cordless phones in our hotel rooms work everywhere on the campus).
We began our tour passing by the giant LED television screen located in the courtyard that sits between the hotel and the conference center. It's one of the largest LED screens in Asia, and can be used for displaying satellite TV or the Web. Further along, we visited Cyberport's mobile phone lab, a space shared by several mobile services developers who create digital content for mobile phones and wireless PDAs. We were then led to a conference room, where the manager of Cyberport gave us an overview of the facilities before taking us to a 360-degree multimedia screening room. Reminiscent to the 360-degree movie shown in EPCOT's China pavilion, the room gave us a chance to see an impressive, digitally animated promotional program highlighting the history, culture and technology of Hong Kong. The high-definition projections that shone on the walls were so bright they often reflected their images onto us as we stood in the center of the room.
Our next stop was a digital production facility, which included a variety of editing, mixing and animation suites. The animation lab featured a smart suit -- a body suit with dozens of small sensors capable of turning the movements of the person wearing it into an animated character. We also got to see a demonstration of the 3D scanners that allowed animators to do a complete 360-degree map of a person and use it to create animated digital images of them.
Posted by acarvin at May 17, 2004 5:54 PM
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