Immersive

The Immersive Lab’s experiments in interactive panoramic cinema focus on designing immersive experiences for presentation in a 270 degree (4-4-4) projection environment, and via an eight-camera, 360 degree recording and editing system. While the projection space creates possibilities for physical immersion, the multi-camera system uses a game console and controller to deliver fully navigable, live action video. This work is specifically designed to explore the properties and limitations of immersive experiences in relation to the codes of cinematic narrative.

Recent research in immersive cinema focused on two courses: CTIN 532: Interactive Experience Design, taught by Mark Bolas and Michael Naimark, and CTCS 478: The Frenzy of Vision, taught by Steve Anderson and Susana Ruiz. The two courses may be thought of as functioning in tandem on a conceptual level, providing divergent platforms and prototypes for exploring the possibilities of immersion as realized on a psychological level as well as in a volitional, interactive environment.

Ironically, immersive technology, which at first glance seems to represent another step on the path toward realism, also suggests ways of questioning our fundamental relations to space time, knowledge and visual perception. Interestingly, the majority of work in both classes yielded projects which departed from the representational conventions of realism, depicting fragmented, disjunctive, or deliberately distorted spaces.

In gravitating toward conceptual investigations of space and perception, several of these projects resisted the presumptive ideals of immersive media. Work with the 8-camera 360 degree system, for example, resulted in two completed projects – Zooetrope and The Recalcitrant Panopticon – which eschew the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema in order to explore notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship as an alternative to traditional storytelling.