'SPATIUM'
with Philip Treacy
Company: INITION
Role: Programmer
DESCRIPTION
A room-scale virtual reality and spatial audio experience inspired by a Philip Treacy (a famous hat maker). It was showcased at the world’s premiere convergence festival, SXSW working in partnership with photographer and director, Roland Lane. The result, ‘Spatium’ is the ultimate convergence project bringing together design, installation, VR, sonic immersion, hip-hop, house, and head-wear. After deciding to collaborate with us, photographer and director Roland Lane came up with the concept of a fully immersive film split into parts, each featuring an iconic hat brought to life in a different way, and pitched the idea to Philip Treacy.
Created as room-scale VR for the HTC Vive, Spatium comprises of four abstract scenes where Treacy’s original creation is rendered into a unique VR object that users can explore and interact with to move each scene on. When seen from the front, the hat appears flat – yet the more you explore, the more you discover an ornate and elaborate structure. When struck by light it appears to glow. These attributes are given such scale as to create a fantasy building, the surfaces of which change as you navigate them. In VR the hat becomes architecture – where the limitations of the physical no longer apply, inspiring wonder.
In the sound and audio, Mixed Immersion took the music created by Hidden Spheres and used it to craft a soundtrack that fully envelops the visual world. The team combined and manipulated real-world acoustic samples with synthesised elements to define each space acoustically in VR – thus giving each an atmospheric, full 3D effect and bringing realism to the experience.
In the installation, a mirror version of the VR experience is fed through to Unity so that head tracking and depth of field are mirrored in real time on a subtly-constructed set of screens, which enclose the space at eye-level. This letter-boxed version of the fully immersive experience plays with ideas of presence and absence, physical and virtual. For people watching outside of the headset, the site installation creates a sliver of what is being seen from within the virtual world; the person that sees is also seen.
Spatium was invited to showcase in both VR Cinema as well as ‘Style’, SXSW’s fashion activation in March of 2017 in Austin, Texas. Both were a huge success, with sessions booked out days in advance and over 500 people having had the Spatium experience during the 5 days it was live. We achieved features in USA Today, The Drum and Vanity Fair, with many industry insiders as well as innovation experts posting and commenting. The piece received invitations to showcase at other festivals from Brazil to Australia.
BRIEF
SPECIFICATION
Core Objective: Create a room-scale, VR experience to showcase the hat in engaging ways.
Environment: Light-emitting, cavernous, abstract.
Target Audience: Non tech-savvy business people but familiar with VR.
Play Time: ~ 5-10 minutes
Comfort: 5/5
TECHNICAL
Digital Medium: Virtual Reality
VR Platform: HTC Vive
Locomotion System: None