The Municipality of Settimo Torinese, a city committed for years to promoting innovation and the dissemination of science, is again organising this year’s Festival of Innovation and Science, in collaboration with the Fondazione Esperienze di Cultura Metropolitana.
The Festival, now in its 11th edition, will take place from 8 to 15 October and will be dedicated to the theme of Languages, explored in multiple aspects: from inclusion to art, from science to the environment, from technology to digital, from media to journalism, from literature to schools, through music, theatre and film. The event will also include moments dedicated to schools and will offer students a unique experience of discovery and learning.
From 9 to 13 October, workshops, lectures, guided tours and theatre performances will be organised, specifically designed to engage young people and bring them closer to the world of science and innovation. The spaces of the Archimedes Library, the beating heart of the event, will be reorganised and put to good use to accommodate the schools. The Festival will, in any case, involve all of Settimo’s places of culture, from the Freidano Ecomuseum to the Mu-Ch Museum of Chemistry and the Suoneria. The days of Friday 13, Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 October will be dedicated to free meetings with experts and great guests. The meetings, lasting about an hour, will be structured to involve a cross-cutting audience, with the aim of dissemination through various mediums, consistent with the ‘pop’ spirit that has always characterised the Festival. In this edition, the Festival aims to make room for the innovative languages of social media, new technologies, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, codes and much more. Workshops, lectures, performances, entertainment, workshops and exhibitions are planned.
Screenings, exhibitions and installations
Exhibitions and installations will already be open to visitors from September: the Archimede Library will host the immersive VR Experience installation, a technology supporting knowledge, a corner set up in collaboration with ETT S.p.A. – Gruppo SCAI and Rai Cinema. At its 12 individual workstations equipped with visors, visitors will be able to enjoy educational, scientific and cultural content in Virtual Reality created by ETT, and the Hello World! exhibition dedicated to programming languages by MuPln (Piedmont Museum of Informatics). The Freidano Ecomuseum, on the other hand, from 30 September will host an exhibition entitled ‘Communicating Olivetti Style’, curated by the Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti, with a selection of iconic design products and communication campaigns of the historic Ivrea-based company.
ETT SpA is a partner of the 11th edition of the Festival dell’Innovazione e della Scienza di Settimo Torinese (Settimo Torinese Science and Innovation Festival), in which it participates with a meeting dedicated to immersive technologies, as part of the cycle of scheduled conferences, and with a VR corner, in collaboration with RAI Cinema, both held in the spaces of the Archimede Library.
Meeting: Immersive technologies and new mediums: from Poetry to VR
Adele Magnelli, ETT’s International Project Manager, will deliver the speech Immersive technologies and new mediums: from Poetry to VR in the Primo Levi Room of the Library on Friday 13 October at 11 am. Part of the programme of the cycle of speeches for local schoolchildren, the meeting will explore the role of new mediums in the creation and transmission of innovative experiences related to literature and poetry. VR Experience, technology supporting knowledge The project introduces immersive multimedia solutions within the Festival of Innovation and Science that accompany visitors to discover educational content created by ETT. The corner is set up, throughout the duration of the Festival, with 12 individual stations equipped with visors, allowing users to enjoy the content in Virtual Reality. Visitors can access:
- The Divine Comedy VR: an immersive journey
The Divine Comedy VR is a project that has produced two short films in VR, Hell and Purgatory, distributed by RAI Cinema and available on RAIPlay and Rai Cinema Channel VR. Francesco Pannofino ‘s voice accompanies the user on an extraordinary journey through Dante’s three canticles, in a work that offers the spectator innovative and highly immersive ways of experiencing the world imagined within one of the masterpieces of world literature and poetry, a symbol of Italy’s linguistic and cultural identity. The journey through the canticles begins in the Dark Forest, traversing some of the most significant moments in Dante’s poem. Passing through the gate of the underworld, Dante’s journey takes the form of a slow and inexorable motion through the punishments and encounters with the damned, up to the terrifying and gigantic figure of Lucifer. Purgatory manifests itself in all its grandeur: a rocky mountain towering in the centre of the southern hemisphere, in the ocean. Coming out of Hell, the passage of time is admitted in this realm: here one can see sunrise and sunset, day and night, and light is shown in all its hues. The settings are modelled, sculpted and painted in 3D. At the compositing stage, actors shot against a green screen are integrated in the close-up scenes where the faces and expressions are perceived. The crowd scenes were made by filming the real movements of actors (MOCAP: motion capture), and bringing those movements back to 3D character. The original soundtracks, set to music by Marco Morini, enrich the viewer’s immersive experience with a particularly engaging sound design.
- Moon Landing
Moon Landing is an immersive experience created by VIS – Virtual Immersion in Science, the first spin-off of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and an ETT Group company. VIS specialises in the production of multimedia material for science dissemination based on innovative digital systems. Thanks to VR 360 technology, it becomes possible to climb aboard Apollo 11 to experience the most famous landing in contemporary history at first hand. Simply put on the visor to find yourself inside the LEM and experience the spectacular 1969 moon landing in the shoes of Neil Armstrong. Moon Landing has a great visual impact thanks to a hyper-realistic reconstruction of the interior and exterior of the Lunar Module. Similar attention to detail is paid to the trajectory of Apollo 11 and the Lunar Sea of Tranquility, whose craters were the scene of the famous landing.
- VR Story: Adriano Olivetti with the eyes of the future
The subject of this Virtual Reality short is the story of Adriano Olivetti, told by combining two different technological solutions: cinematic VR (360° live shooting) and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery: computer graphics reconstruction). It is Adriano Olivetti himself, with the voice of a very young student, who speaks in the first person and tells about himself and the company’s history. The spectator can immerse himself in a journey that takes him or her from the events of the past to the present day, related during a panoramic flight over the city of Ivrea and created with live drone shots and a special VR camera.