Saturday, September 13, 2008

Been busy this month

Alright, this might not really be "out of the lab" stuff, but over the last month, we have done a few things that were pretty interesting. The thought was to take some of the stuff we already have and make it better. We did turn back to the boys in the lab to refine these, so it technically is "out of the lab", but more from an advancement standpoint.

The result are a few projects that we put together over the last month. Here is a quick look and an explanation of why they are cool...or, at least, why I think they are cool.

1. This is one of our standard 360 degree video domes, but the twist on this one is the content. we usually take a mix of CG and still imagery, as there is not a high-res source that can capture hemispherical. We crafted up this monster of a rig to shoot the world's first 4K hemispherical. Yup, that is a Nikkor 6mm on a RED ONE.




...And the result.

2. This is a pic of something we did for Google out at Fashion Week in NYC. It is using one of our standard multi-channel HD rigs, but the cool twist is that we embedded the screens behind mirrors and put it in a 3 sided box that was 10' tall. We used one of our 8 channel HD surround rig behind glass, which gave the appearance of having the imagery floating in space. We "interacti-fied" it by writing an iPhone app that let us drive the media, sequence and content from any of our phones.



3. Not being busy enough, we decided to take our multitouch technology to the next level by figuring out how to integrate our own "deep zoom" type of functionality into the app. Basically, we let people take a trip from space and drill down into a virtual tour of Dubai, all from the comfort of the Javitz Center. I would post a video, but I didn't go, so we don't have any video documentation of this thing. sucks.



Anyway, besides what we did for GM last year, this is the only other time I have ever seen a 6'x4' multitouch wall that the public could play with.