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This site was very personal to Jim. The Charlottesville High
School orchestra program, under the direction of Laura Thomas,
has achieved a level of sophistication that is very rare in
music programs on that level. Back in 1995 they performed at
a prestigious concert in Chicago and one of the music educators
there recommended them to the International Youth and Music
Festival in Vienna, Austria. Shortly thereafter they received
an invitation to attend and compete in the next festival. As
it turned out, the year they would travel, all three of the
Gibson children were in that orchestra (two of them are twins).
The only catch to this very gratifying invitation was that it
would take almost a quarter of a million dollars to get the
orchestra there and back. Pam Gibson (Jim’s wife and GDA’s
office manager) took on the formidable task of spearheading
that fundraising, and in the process she wound up getting the
community very excited about what the kids were about to do.
GDA donated an extensive collection of design work to support
all the fund-raising activities, and both Pam and Jim were invited
to go along on the trip as chaperones. With the entire community
abuzz about the upcoming trip, Jim decided to write, build,
and post a web site, day-by-day with pictures, news, and notes
for the folks back home. It was a big hit. As a matter of fact
when Jim stepped off the bus he had a number of parents come
up and give him a big hug before they found their own kids in
the crowd.
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Quick-and-dirty VR
The camera Jim carried on this trip was very rudimentary by
today’s digital camera standards, but using it was more
fun than using any of the more sophisticated cameras GDA has
owned since. It was small, silent, and had a swiveling lens
housing that made it possible to face one way and shoot in a
completely different direction. All very useful when you are
trying to catch the action without affecting it too much. But
the most fun Jim had with this camera was when he was faced
with a subject that was too massive in scale to capture in a
single shot. The Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, with some
1,400 rooms, is a daunting sight, and no single photo can do
it’s expansive scale justice. So Jim stood in the courtyard
and quickly snapped off a series of pictures, rotating about
twenty degrees with each one. Back in the hotel room he pieced
them all together to create a 360 degree “VR” experience.
It worked. It was way too time-consuming to do many of these,
but he did it again with Vienna’s beautiful Votivkirche
as the orchestra gave a concert there. |
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