Post by scotttucker on Nov 11, 2022 0:44:57 GMT -7
Last Friday I bought a ticket for one day of the UK Fulldome 22 festival which was running at the Market Hall Dome in Plymouth - a beautiful 15m Spitz seamless dome that opened about a year ago. The focus was very much on digital immersive films and art but I thought it would be really interesting to go - here is my review:
At the beginning I felt a little bit like a fish out of water - everyone else appeared to know each other and they were proper artists/ professional digital content makers but it was a really nice friendly atmosphere.
Lindsey Hall of the Real Ideas organisation gave an introductory talk - I was humbled by the operating philosophy of the dome which is to make the walls 'porous' so that the local community really feels they are part of it rather than it being a nice attraction for the more affluent suburbs -(it is located in one of the 10% most deprived innercity communities in England.) The Market Hall as a whole is a genuinely positive social enterprise.
I had never really paid much attention to sound-The Market Hall dome has 19 speakers and there were demonstrations of software which controls how the sound follows objects around the dome. Not something I will be replicating any time soon in the attic!
There were talks about new dome builds in Almeida Portugal and Kirkudbrught Scotland. I had a chat with the presenters in the margins and negative pressure domes seem to be the current trend supplied by companies in Brazil and Ukraine.
Perhaps of interest for the amateur is that Fulldome VJs.com is offering dome mapping/ blending software for £200 - I noticed there was some discussion of other packages costing far more on the facebook Groups.
In my naive amateur mindset I had not really appreciated that the paying customers constitute a pretty small fraction of the funding for professional installations which draw funding from a range of grants, donations and even get substantial sums for selling naming rights.
A highlight was a performance piece called 'rain' in which the movement of digital raindrops in the dome echoed the movements of a real dancer wearing a motion capture suit in real time.
A number of films were shown - as with all art some were really beautiful others left me a little cold.
The real highlight for me was that I made contact with some folk from the University of Plymouth who agreed in principle to me photographing/measuring the old Zeiss ZKP1 projector that they have - I will put a thread in the 3D model threads about this.
At the beginning I felt a little bit like a fish out of water - everyone else appeared to know each other and they were proper artists/ professional digital content makers but it was a really nice friendly atmosphere.
Lindsey Hall of the Real Ideas organisation gave an introductory talk - I was humbled by the operating philosophy of the dome which is to make the walls 'porous' so that the local community really feels they are part of it rather than it being a nice attraction for the more affluent suburbs -(it is located in one of the 10% most deprived innercity communities in England.) The Market Hall as a whole is a genuinely positive social enterprise.
I had never really paid much attention to sound-The Market Hall dome has 19 speakers and there were demonstrations of software which controls how the sound follows objects around the dome. Not something I will be replicating any time soon in the attic!
There were talks about new dome builds in Almeida Portugal and Kirkudbrught Scotland. I had a chat with the presenters in the margins and negative pressure domes seem to be the current trend supplied by companies in Brazil and Ukraine.
Perhaps of interest for the amateur is that Fulldome VJs.com is offering dome mapping/ blending software for £200 - I noticed there was some discussion of other packages costing far more on the facebook Groups.
In my naive amateur mindset I had not really appreciated that the paying customers constitute a pretty small fraction of the funding for professional installations which draw funding from a range of grants, donations and even get substantial sums for selling naming rights.
A highlight was a performance piece called 'rain' in which the movement of digital raindrops in the dome echoed the movements of a real dancer wearing a motion capture suit in real time.
A number of films were shown - as with all art some were really beautiful others left me a little cold.
The real highlight for me was that I made contact with some folk from the University of Plymouth who agreed in principle to me photographing/measuring the old Zeiss ZKP1 projector that they have - I will put a thread in the 3D model threads about this.
