Jeffrey
Shaw, Dennis Del Favero, Neil Brown, Ian Howard, Ross Gibson, Mark
Gugliemetti, Adrian Miles, Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, Henry
Gardner, Pascal Vuylsteker
Technical Lead and Cinematography: Volker Kuchelmeister
2003-2006
240 x 360 degree digital video camera for interactive immersive visualisation
research applications
The Spherecam project involves the development of a high-resolution 240 x 360 degree digital video camera system and post-production facilities.
Background
While advances in digital technology have revolutionised the field
of cinema and multimedia, for a number of theoretical and technical
reasons, the domain of immersive high-resolution digital video recording
using global capture systems, has yet to take advantage of these developments.
The promise of fully immersive high-resolution digital capture proposed
by this system is twofold. Firstly, its unprecedented field of view
opens up the process of documentation to global information capture
and representational flexibility implied by such a recording system.
Video imaging is currently held captive to older pictorial paradigms
of visualisation dominated by the picture plane and the frame. The
entrenched role of the frame in conventional cinema places severe
limits on the immersive quality of the information recorded and on
the ability to generate large and seamless informational spaces to
navigate. Secondly, high-resolution digital capture resolves information
at a specification equivalent to conventional large format film cameras,
but with the advantages of enhanced portability, offering far longer
recording times, immediate access to the recorded data, non-linear
interactive capabilities, and much lower overall production, post-production
and presentation costs.
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Full 360ºx180º spherical image, in rectlinear
and fisheye projection |
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Global recording technology works beyond the perspectival framing
constraints of traditional lenses and, as such, constitutes an expanded
model of representation that is truer to the way we actually apprehend
the world. Contrary to the enlargement of the screen (e.g. CinemaScope),
this camera’s enlargement of the image space achieves semantic
extension of the narrative space. By creating such extensions of the
image space, the navigable environment allows the interactive viewer
to assume the role of both camera operator and editor, operations
that are pre-determined in conventional cinema. Reformulating the
role of narrative in new media and interactive cinema promises a significant
extension of their cultural and commercial benefits by exploring the
relation between cultural drivers of digital information and their
dependent technologies. The reformulation involves three types of
narrative: polychronic – digitally generated social spaces in
which both viewers and fictional entities are allotted an autonomous
voice; transcriptive – in which viewers can dramatise freely
available multi-modal forms of digital information into idiosyncratic
narratives that are eventful and cinematic in character; co-evolutionary
– modelled on the emergent narrative interaction between the
behaviour of virtual actors or avatars and real viewers. In a virtual
environment, viewers join with the author to influence the pattern
of the narrative that emerges. Narrative reformulation involves the
resolution of fundamental problems in theoretical modelling, software
design, adaptive computing, visualisation techniques and interface
research, building on the predictions advanced in the systemic narrative
theory of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres and Manuel De Landa.
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Vertical field of view test |
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