I recently attended the IX Symposium 2015 in Montreal, Canada. The Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) is the perfect venue for such a completely unique event dedicated to immersion. And I am left with so much inspiration to act on! Each day had its own helpful theme to organize the screenings and presentations:

Day 1: Opening
Day 2: Expansion – Shifting Horizons
Day 3: Hybridization – Integration Techniques
Day 4: Emergence – Re-cognizing Complexity
Day 5: Transcaling – Beyond Boundaries.

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We have been asked to participate on several panels at the upcoming IMERSA Summit 2015. So I’ll be apart of the Future Immersion Panel and share some of the techniques we used to shoot 360 video while on location at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Planetarium director David Rabkin will be involved in two panels: Immersive Media Strategies and Challenges and New Directions in Alternative Content.

I’m also excited to announce that From Dream to Discovery: Inside NASA has been selected to be screened during IMERSA. It will be shown directly after the Future Immersion Panel, which is perfect since you’ll have just seen behind the scenes.

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Experience the challenges of the next generation of space exploration in this brand-new Planetarium show. By using exciting real-life projects like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the show highlights the extreme nature of spacecraft engineering and the life cycle of a space mission – from design and construction to the rigors of testing, launch, and operations. Blast off and take the voyage with us!

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Our show Moons: Worlds of Mystery has be selected to be a part of the competition screening during the IPS-Macao International Fulldome Festival 2014! So if you’re attending the IPS Conference, then be sure to mark your schedule.

After the festival, we have the added honor of being one of only six productions to continue screening for the public in Macao (6/21 – 7/31) and Beijing (6/28 to 7/31).

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IX: Symposium on Immersive Creativity
In just a few days this fascinating and first-time conference will begin in Montreal and last for 5 days. Last year I saw the SAT team perform at Immersa 2013, and they were already doing come cutting edge work. So I’m curious to see how this event kicks off.

The IX Symposium will provide an open exchange platform through a series of keynotes, panels, demonstrations, performances and immersive productions. An objective of the symposium is to help democratize access to immersive spaces and to the tools and processes used for the creation of original contents. Another objective is to foster a network facilitating the creation of a community and the circulation of people, ideas, and works. This will help rethink the models of production, the formats, the delivery systems, and the creative processes needed to maintain and nurture an international platform for strong artistic expressions and open innovation.

Shortcuts: An Experimental Dance Film Competition
We are looking for videos, who look at dance through the new medium of 3-dimensional/spherical cinematography. Dance and an experimental approach should be at the center of the work. Focal point of interest should be real filmed scenes and not computer generated and/or animated film sequences.

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I’m excited to see the launch of a fulldome artist residency to help open up the medium to artists. I’m particularly interested that dome production training is a major part of the training. With so few offered workshops and college classes in the world, it’s difficult to break into the medium on top of all the technical hurdles and getting dome access. The fulldome world is a narrow but growing market and so this is an important resource for allowing artists to experiment on an actual dome. More info below.

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The Cosmic Loops live music event was a smashing success and it was obvious that the audience left feeling electric! So plans are already underway to schedule more live music in the dome with Ian Ethan Case. Below are some wonderful photos taken by David Rabkin.

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October 2013 Photos

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We are working hard on our latest fulldome production show about NASA engineering, but we do try to squeeze some fun projects into the mix. So lately we have been creating some custom dome visuals for an upcoming live music event in the planetarium — Cosmic Loops: Music Beneath the Stars

But there are some interesting challenges in trying to create pre-rendered dome visuals for live music. The musicians supplied the songs they will be playing live, so we at least had an understanding the specific moments to match. We have seen that many entertainment shows try to stay synced to the beat. But we realized that in an immersive space you just want to soak it up the moment of beauty around you. So we have taken a different approach of grandiose scenery with gentle camera moves. We aren’t making a music video but instead an experience where the music and visuals amplify each other. We aspire for goosebumps. For frisson!

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If you’ve ever needed to edit a DigitalSky script but you’re on a computer that that doesn’t have DigitalSky installed… Well editing the plain text definitely works, but it’s easy to make mistakes and quite hard on the eyes.

So Andrew Hazelden has added syntax highlighting of DigitalSky scripts to several code editors .  In other words, the code is automatically colorized to make it much easier to read.

These code editors have downloadable modules to add DigitalSky support:
— Notepad++ (Windows)
— TextWrangler (Mac)
— BBEdit (Mac)
— Gedit (Linux, Max, Windows)

Currently there is a kickstarter running with an interesting hybrid of fulldome and theater: The Kepler Story: Theater + Science + Harmony. This show will be created particularly for the interactivity of an actor in mind. Meaning the fulldome visuals will react in realtime to the actors movements; throwing out their hand to have stars shoot out at their command. Includes the work of Cymatrix. Needless to say I’m intrigued with the possibilities. The kickstarter project ends on Tuesday, August 20th.

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