Institute For The Future

Ultra Wide Views Exhibit - Montréal Libre Graphics

Check out this amazing panoramic (cycloramic?) & 3D video work being produced all on open source software from the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montréal. Would love to bring these technologies & technologists together with the Global Lives Project collaborator network and try to produce some interesting content around the globe. Seems like cameras need to be stationary though, which would preclude us from following individuals around, but could allow for interesting still videos.

The Ultra Wide Views Exhibition at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 from Yuval Levy on Vimeo.

From the video, it also sounds like they spin a single camera around in a circle (video or still?) to capture the whole panorama and then stitch it all together and add moving elements in post-production. At the end though, they show some pretty cool fisheye video—I wonder how far along the software/image quality/rendering capability is getting to turn that sort of fisheye imagery into a cycloramic video if the camera is placed on the ground... From my reading about the Diver Project (now defunct?) and my conversations with my brilliant colleague, Mike Liebhold, it seems like this ought to work well enough with the requisite technologies in place. I wonder how far off it is from me being able to use it though...

 

Part of me wonders though—didn't I see this like 15 years ago at Disney World or Epcot with a crew bringing some amazing contraption with a bunch of cameras on it down a street in China or something like that? It was quite a while back, but I do remember being coralled into a very large room surrounded by screens that had something like this [transition–cue dream sequence & hazy memory effect]. Ah yes, a few keystrokes later, it's clear that what I was remembering was the Reflections of China exhibit shown in Circle Vision 360°, a technique first used in 1955 (!!) and pioneered by the Walt Disney Company.

 

I suppose that the moral of the story is that I should spend more time thinking about the future in Tomorrowland and continue to remember William Gibson's oft-cited adage that "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed."

 

Thanks to Jon Philips (ReJon.org), Yuval Levy and Lyn Jeffery for the chain of posts that brought this to my little eyes, and to all the awesome and dedicated free/libre software geeks and their dedication to make this technology free and open to the world.

Cross-posted at davidevanharris.com.