"Do you have gingerbread dough?" asks one of the expedition members, foreshadowing the festive nature of the journey to the star, which will culminate in a successful return to Šrámek's auditorium on Prague's Charles Square. All goes well, except for the burnt gingerbread forgotten in the oven, fortunately only virtual.
The role of the three-member crew was played by computer graphics students Barbora Koudelková, Martin Pišna and Josef Bacík, who also spent many hours on the graphic design of the application for the purpose of filming. "We had to finish the outer shell of the ship and design Christmas decorations such as a Christmass star, gingerbread houses, cut-out boxes and baking trays. The most challenging part was probably to adjust the appearance of the characters to match the real actors and their clothes," says Dr. David Sedláček, head of the Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory at the Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction at CTU FEL. The programming of the Christmas version was done by PhD student Uršula Žákovská.
Prof. Jiří Žára, head of the Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction, plays the role of a professor who encourages his students to go on a virtual expedition. His department is the oldest and the largest of its kind in the Czech Republic. Around 120 students study the specialisation in the Bachelor's and 30 students in the Master's programme in Open Computer Science. The members of the department focus not only on teaching, but also on research and collaboration with industrial partners. To give you an idea, academics contract with companies that are leaders in their fields - Skoda Auto, Adobe Research, Google, Walt Disney Research, Deloitte. In fact, the aforementioned space application was created in collaboration with the consulting and technology company Deloitte.
The Christmas video of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of CTU is the fourth one in a row - the tradition was started three years ago with a video that brought the most interesting robots that academics use for their research under the Christmass tree. In 2022, CTU's Faculty of Electrical Engineering recalled the atmosphere of the Signal Festival in a video, when its robot zoo on Charles Square became one of the attractions of the entire Prague edition of the show. Last year's video demonstrated the fusion of technology and music, when devices from the laboratories of electrical engineers, roboticists and computer scientists were transformed into musical instruments. This year's Christmas video was produced by Seeya Creative.
Link to this year´s video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxsOo2QYdVg&list=PLQL6z4JeTTQnRe3Y58AUw_nTZQxpEmbXM
Illustrations are available here.