Vioso helps create immersive studio space
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“When we created this cylinder, we had the one objective in mind; put the human back in the centre of VR technology,” comments Amaury Chevrier, owner of 13-2. “We realised that there was a lot of 3D and immersive content in the market but when you’re wearing a VR helmet, you’re on your own. We wanted to create a new kind of immersive space.”
After months of research, tests, and prototypes, 13-2 Studio were led to create what has been billed as the first shared VR experience in France. The finished cylinder – which is made of aluminium and internally wrapped with projection material – requires only 6m x 6m of floor area and 2.95m of ceiling height to be set up, and is equipped with five Optoma 1080GTDarbee projectors, four Yamaha speakers, and a subwoofer.
As well as being compact, the cylinder can be built, calibrated, and ready to play within five hours and even split into two if the situation demands it. One of the key reasons for the cylinder’s ease and speed of deployment is the power of Vioso’s proprietary calibration software, Anyblend, which comes pre-installed on its Anystation Media server.
“We met with Etienne Servant from Vioso at ISE in 2019, who showed us what they were capable of doing,” Chevrier explained. “After we developed the cylinder, he came to see us and trained us in the use of the calibration software. The fact that Vioso had an office in France was really useful to help us build our knowledge of their software.”
A prospective client’s content, which is also created to order by 13-2 Studio, can either be streamed or fed by an external computer, and ultra-high-resolution playback is achieved thanks to the server Vioso Anystation Media and content player Pixera Vioso software. According to 13-2 Studio, this setup is rock solid, and offers various options for input and output configurations.
“With a regular dome, although it’s very complex, it’s already easier to deal with the content because it is essentially a distorted square,” adds Chevrier. “The cylinder, on the other hand, has very specific challenges. Because you’re working on 360-degree content, where something on degree ‘zero’ is essentially touching the thing on degree ‘360’. It requires complex image processing and handling, as well as precise overlapping.”
Etienne Servant, commercial director of Vioso France, confirms: “A cylindrical content is arguably one of the most complex shape to calibrate for a number of reasons: The cylinder usage requires the use of short throw projectors, which project an image rounded at the bottom on a surface that is also curved, creating a “double warping” layer.”
Calibration cameras will ignore some of the content because it is simply too complex to analyse, so this is where Vioso Core, our calibration tool steps in by using extrapolation to recreate the missing content, and help the camera to “make sense of it and project the right content”.
Since June 2019, 13-2 Studio has rolled the Immersive Cylinder out to a number of clients and locations; mainly companies wanting to immerse viewers in a certain atmosphere in order to present a specific topic.
“We are very satisfied with the end result,” concludes Chevrier. “We’ve achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve and have already had excellent feedback from clients and end users.”
(Jim Evans)
