Project Seeds

Welcome to the official blog for Immersive Film at Berkeley! As a group, our current goal is to generate content in the 360 degree film space that can help bring exposure to the advantages of the emerging technology. Currently we consist of two teams: a producer team which focuses on creating films and pioneering new ways to make the most of the technology, and a developers team which mainly works with the visual and audial transformations needed to create a coherent 360 degree experience.

Over the first month of meeting and planning, each team has decided on certain criteria to meet to meet our semester goals. The producer team has gone through various project pitches, and has decided on the following few to investigate further:

1. An interaction based film which would bring certain actions into focus, both visually and aurally, based on user movement and direction. The setting could be a coffeeshop, which could act as a caravanserai of many different agendas. It’s a nice setting to showcase 360 degree audio, allowing a user to fully indulge in whichever experience or conversation s/he so desires.
2. Similar to the film above, except that the setting would be a bar. There would be a peaceful introduction and a series of mellow events to serve as a stark contrast to a following major event, such as an explosion or a robbery. The user is then rewinded through time to deduce why and how the major event happened.
3. A film in which a Pokémon escapes from the Pokémon GO app, and starts running around Berkeley. The user would be responsible for following the rogue Pokémon, eventually returning it to its Pokéball.
4. A music video in which every successive room the user is taken through is increasingly strange. Some ideas include rooms where everything is upside-down, or where everything is submerged underwater.
5. A 360 degree collage of faces, where looking at one face long enough launches a cut scene into that person’s life.

Meanwhile, the developer team has focused on choosing an audio layout for speakers to help best produce a 360 experience. Eventually, they came up with three designs:

1. An overhead design with four mics, two oriented vertically and two oriented horizontally. An advantage is that left audio signals directly map to left ear audio channels, and right signals go to right channels. Requires the most 3D printing, since we need a lot of tubing.

2. A design in which the head is around the mic. One mic would correspond to one person listening.

3. A design in which the mics are on the sides, forming a rectangular pattern.

In the end, the team chose the center mic position. Going forward, the producer team will undergo more training and begin choosing settings and casts to film their projects, and the developers team will create the technology needed to implement an immersive 360 degree audio system.

Originally published at immersivefilm.wordpress.com on October 26, 2016.