Very cool: 3D Projection-Mapping Blasted From Half-mile Out To Sydney Opera House Sails
March 18, 2011 by Dave Haynes
This looks pretty spankin’ amazing on a bunch of levels.
A week-long music festival in Sydney, Australia will culminate with a performance at the city’s iconic concert hall by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra – some 100 classical musicians from around the globe who auditioned online to be part of this event.
The big concert on Sunday evening will feature 3D projection mapping put together by San Francisco-based experiential technology firm Obscura Digital.
Obscura Digital will beam projections from a half-mile away onto the façade of the Western Sails of the Sydney Opera House, integrating live camera feeds from the concert hall with stylized treatments and live digital painting components.
The visuals will also run inside the opera house – a bit like those Pink Floyd laser shows at the local planetarium, except about a billion times more compelling.
“If we achieve what we are trying to do, we will be creating musically expressive architecture,” says Travis Threlkel, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Obscura Digital. “We will enable audiences to experience the Sydney Opera House in a new light by using optical illusions that make it appear to be moving and accentuating itself based on what is taking place with the live performance inside the concert hall, essentially allowing the building to become a living, breathing artistic representation of the music.”
Obscura’s team of creatives, technologists, and strategists conceptualized and designed the interactive visual performance component to the music, so audiences can be exposed to a show of light and sound from all angles.
Obscura are the guys who did the big multi-touch touch wall at the Hard Rock Cafe (not casino, as I wrote at time) on the Vegas strip (15 trips and I have still not found time to go see that, dammit!) and, more recently, those very cool interactive bus shelters done with ClearChannel Outdoor.
For this two-hour show, the company designed its own configuration of projection media, with custom interfaces, controls, and software systems that will enable them to “respond to the nuance” of the musical performance directed by world-class conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.
Preset’s David Weinfeld has been working for Obscura (we all do other stuff, as well) for the last few months. Really interesting company.
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