Obscura Digital 7 Channel display of HD mapped back onto outdoor plaza

So this was a really sweet project. Ricky and the boys hoisted 5 20K Christies up to the 4th floor balcony overlooking the plaza. The other two were stacked away on the ground and off at a 40 degree angle from the smaller building.



The media we created was designed to work directly with the architecture and synchronized to a music track created by our own Alex Oropeza. Some of the new guys did some really amazing work with the media, and the FireFrame software did the trick by synchronizing and blending all the projectors and fitting it perfectly with the old SF Mint building.

The project was commissioned by one of our clients, McAfee, who are great to work with and really creative.

Anyway, the project was amazing and may tour. Dunno.

Officially Blogging from the sky

Alright, so this is not really a "blog", because i dont update it daily or whatever defines a blog, but today, I blog! Currently at 35,000 feet over Denver (thanks to $12.95 and gogointernet) with thunderstorms making this the bumpiest ride ever, the flight attendents have been strapped in for an hour now, so I am going to take this opportunity to blog from the sky. I may even Tweet later, but that is still to be decided.

The reason for the post is because I am just returning from NYC having worked with Google/Youtube Creative Labs, Michael Tilson Thomas and the YTSO to create the first surround projection classical symphony at Carnegie Hall. Check it out. This piece is by Mason Bates. Gotta watch it in HD.



We used 8 Projectors to cover the entire inside of the hall, which has never been done before. The result was stunning. We designed all the visuals to accompany the music conducted by MTT.

Here is Flight of the Bumble Bee in SD. Ill post HD later...it was great..

Not quite outta the lab, but outta the country....

This is one of our coolest projects that we had to work on last year. The big challenge was how to light-up a skyscraper in downtown Seoul with 4 HD 30K Roadies and not project in the windows of the office workers. Couple that with the fact that we needed to shoot the projection from a little deck about 100 feet away, and at an an angle of 70 degrees. Hard. We built some really cool climate controlled enclosures, got with AVS and put some first surface mirrors with heaters on them and air-knives to shed the water/snow and produced a 12,000 sq. ft. video wall. 14 stories tall, 120 feet wide, 120,000 lumens of video. nice.




All in all, this turned into the highest resolution and possibly largest permanent video on the planet.



Untitled from patrick connolly on Vimeo.

I'm just getting around to posting this...

It has been a ridiculously busy few months. While I have been in a few countries, the guys in the lab have been putting together a few new projects that are kind of cool. This one actually uses our real-time 3D modeling engine to allow people to interact with a touch screen and drive the application. I guess what is pretty unique here is that this is taking actual CAD data out of .DXF/.DWG files and allowing people to manipulate them in real-time.





We call the application AirTouch. Although the user does touch the screen, the image kind of looks like it is in air.

Instead of some pre-rendered camera path or a “generally accurate” gesture input, this is actually rendering CAD @ 60Hz on the fly. Yes, it can do 120Hz for stereo, but that doesn’t translate well onto the web.


Anyway, we see some pretty big markets for this type of technology, including architecture, engineering, medical and even entertainment. Who knows, but as of today, it is a good way for people to take things from the virtual world and interact with them in the real world.

Oh, and it also works off of proximity detection as well (thanks Steve), so that you don’t need to actually touch anything to determine Z plane, so for you doctors out there, wanting to go through scans in real-time w/o touching anything, here ya go.