The AlloSphere is a ten meter spherical theater intended to immerse multiple users in an audio/visual work. The goal of this project is to explore the potentials and problems of streaming audio/video data in to and out of the AlloSphere with the hopes of moving on to remote observation and data collection or augmented reality projects that may prove more interesting than bare telepresence.
An Axis 2120 network camera with panoramic lens attachment was used to capture video. A Processing sketch periodically sends a HTTP GET request to the camera’s IP address which returns an image of the panoramic mirror. This image is unwrapped and displayed inside the sphere. Only about 120 degrees (horizontally) of the sphere are being projected on currently, so only one-third of the full panorama is displayed. The panoramic lens attachment was an easy solution to get started with, but won’t provide a full hemisphere’s view - for this a reflective sphere will be more suitable and at least two cameras will be needed light up both the upper and lower hemispheres of the AlloSphere.
The next step will to be investigate how to improve the resolution and frame rate of the incoming video. There also may be opportunities to work with Ken Fields from University of Calgary (and former UCSB student) on low-latency audio streaming for networked musical performance in real time.
Thanks to Karl Yerkes, August Black, Angus Forbes, Pablo Colapinto, Charlie Roberts, Matt Wright, and, of course, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, for their continued help with this project.
