June 1, 2007

Experience Site-Specific Dance Performances with Immersive Media

I was browsing the Dancing in the Streets website to learn about their upcoming site-specific performances in NYC after covering the new Google street-level mapping service on Wednesday. And I was wondering what it would be like to experience a site-specific performance in an immersive theater environment with a planetarium-like dome.

The Making of Street-Level Google Maps

For its street-level maps, Google is attaching a 360-degree camera to the roof of a car, which then shoots pictures of every block in a city. One of the camera systems they're using is from Immersive Media and looks like this:

And the camera mounted on a car looks like this:

[via Boing Boing and PR. Differently]

The end result is that this camera takes street-level pictures such as this one of Lincoln Center, which you can view on Google Maps:

Record Site-Specific Dance Performances with a 360-Degree Video Camera

Now imagine that you have a 360-degree video camera and you're situated in the middle of a street. On both sides of you there are dancers propelling down buildings with rock-climbing gear. Think of this image from Microsoft when the software giant introduced it's new Vista operating system:

With a single panoramic, full-motion camera, you can take 360-degree videos so that you can record the unfolding of the Vista banner banner above as well as the same thing which could hypothetically be happening on the other side of the street.

Heading to a Planetarium

Now that you have your panoramic video, you can project it in a theater with a dome such as the ones you'll find in a planetarium. As viewers look toward the ceiling, they will feel as if they are in the middle of the street as you were and they'll be surrounded by video of dancers projected on all sides. If you watch the Immersive Media "How it Works" demo, you'll see that one of the applications is for group immersive experiences.

I don't anticipate Dancing in the Streets running-out to buy these 360-degree video cameras anytime soon. But prices always come down for new technologies and one day the cost of capturing site-specific performances will not be prohibitive.

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