Communication Arts feat. Beatie Wolfe's Raw Space

Beatie Wolfe Raw Space
Creativity knows no bounds, not even technological ones, at Design I/O
— Communication Arts, Nov '17

Excerpt from article posted November 2017 profiling Design I/O

...Raw Space, which was the world’s first live, 360-degree, augmented-reality stream.

Created for singer/songwriter Beatie Wolfe, it took place on May 5, 2017, at Bell Labs’ anechoic chamber, once the world’s quietest room. To help them out, the team brought in illustrators Josh Goodrich and James Paterson. Working in 3-D illustration program Quill, they created 40 minutes of generative moths and other dynamic elements that floated around Wolfe as she strummed a guitar in the huge and strange space. Over the next week, they also streamed the songs from a record player in the chamber with live visuals.

We’ve only really scratched the surface of merging design and technology.” —Theo Watson. If you’re looking for a major challenge, streaming 4K, 360-degree video while you’re creating generative illustrations in real time fits the bill. “All the tech was on the edge of not being possible,” says Watson. “We were generating stereoscopic 3-D video that’s predistorted. Our software had to create these distortions to perfectly match those of the stereoscopic camera feed so that the generated visuals looked correct when they moved around Beatie.”

To show how tricky and even dangerous this is, at one point, they made the simple mistake of sending the video streams to the wrong eyes. This promptly caused Hardeman, who had volunteered to be a test subject, to become nauseous and rip off the 3-D goggles. But the project came together as one of the most ambitious uses of virtual reality so far....

Read the full article HERE

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