School of Media, Arts and Humanities - for students and staff

Equipment

Here you will find information on the core equipment available to Digital students at the University of Sussex. For a full list of equipment please log into your SISO account. 

Wacom Cintiq 27QHD Kit

The Wacom Cintiq kits can be booked via SISO and are required to use the Wacom Cintiq 270HD creative pen display. The kit includes a Wacom Pro Pen, Pen Stand with 6 pen nibs, ExpressKey Remote, and a mini USB cable.

The Cintiq 27QHD offers true-to-life color on a high-resolution display giving you clarity and color sensitivity for use in creative areas such as; image editing, illustration, 2D/3D animation, game development, print & pre-press proofing and graphic design. It boasts a widescreen 16:9 display with four times the pixel density of standard HDTV and providing a resolution able to handle even the finest of details. 

The ExpressKey Remote encourages a faster, more flexible workflow with a Touch Ring that helps you scroll, zoom and rotate with ease. Put it on the screen, beside your keyboard or right in your hand. 

Go Pro Fusion

With its ability to capture immersive 5.2K 360-degree spherical content, the Go Pro Fusion camera captures everything around you. The Fusion utilises gimbal-like stabilization to ensure everything you capture is super smooth. 

The GoPro app enables users to control the camera, live preview their shots, and stitch, trim and share content right from their iOS smartphone (Android coming soon). On desktop, the Fusion Studio software lets you re-frame and save traditional fixed perspective videos “punched out” from the large 360-degree video. 

Fusion, together with its apps, enables people to capture and share unique perspectives that are not possible with traditional single lens cameras. 

Wacom Pen Tablets

Digital students also have access to other digital drawing equipment, in the form of smaller, more portable Wacom pen tablets, such as the Wacom Intuous and Intuous 3.

These pen tablets feature market-leading Wacom technology and are compatible with all of our workstations and most home systems. Great for both casual artists and professionals, the Intuos line have everything you need to live out your artistic aspirations.

Apple ipad & Apple Pencil

The combination of the Apple Pencil and ipad offers an alternate digital drawing experience when compared to our Wacom pen tablets and displays. It provides users the ability to draw directly onto the screen, whilst also boasting high portability and ease of use. Good for both casual artists and professionals alike.

Light Box

Light boxes, or light tables/pads as they're also known, allow for accurate repeats in pattern or subject matter and are very useful tools for animators and artists alike. In traditonal 2D animation, a lightbox can be used to trace an underlying, original image and then slightly alter its form or position to create another image. These images are then captured, via camera or scanner, to create a sequence of images that form the illusion of movement and animation.

Other uses for lightboxes are: embroidery, appliqués, quilting, needlework, scrapbooking, embossing, tattoos, cut-outs, filigrees and pierced work.

Kinect Motion Sensor

The Kinect is a motion sensing input device that incorporates RGB cameras, infrared projectors and detectors and a microphone array. The sensor alongside the in-built software and artificial intelligence, allows the device to perform real-time gesture recognition, speech recognition and body skeletal detection. Whilst orignially designed for gaming, the Kinect can be used for a wide range of data capture outcomes, such as motion capture.for animation.

The newer Kinect has greater accuracy with three times the fidelity over its predecessor and can track without visible light by using an active IR sensor. It has a 60% wider field of vision and can track up to 6 skeletons at once. It can also detect a users's heart rate, facial expression, the position and orientation of 25 individual joints (including thumbs), the weight put on each limb and the speed of the user's movements.

Physical Computing Kits

Physical computing kits are interactive systems that can sense and respond to various stimuli. They can often be used to provide a creative framework for understanding our relationship to the digital world. In practical use, the term most often refers to projects that use sensors and microcontrollers to translate analog input into a software system, and/or control electro-mechanical devices such as motors, servos, lighting or other hardware. Physical computing can often intersect a wide range of areas such as; electrical engineering, mechatronics, robotics, computer science, and embedded development.

Digital students can choose from a range of physical computing kits, including:

  • Arduino uno kits
  • Makey Makey kits
  • Bare Conductive touch board inventors kit
  • Grove starter kit for Arduino
  • Littlebits kit
  • Sparkfun Digital Sandbox kits