MSA Visuals/Marshmallow Laser Feast Takes Immersive Mapping to New Level

Mehmet Akten a.k.a. Memo of Mega Super Awesome Visuals co-directed these amazing pieces of mapping madness with fellow Marshmallow Laser Feast cohorts Barney from The Found Collective and Robin from Flat-e.

I’ll let him explain: “For the launch of the Sony PlayStation Video Store, our job was to bring a living room alive with hints at various hollywood blockbuster franchises – so we decided to push projection mapping to a new level. We projection mapped a living room space with camera (or head) tracking and dynamic perspective. All content realtime 3D, camera (or head) is tracked to
match and update the 3D perspective in realtime to the viewers point of view. Add to this real props, live puppetry, interaction between the virtual and physical worlds, a little bit of pyrotechnics and a lot of late nights. I can tell you, physically walking around in that space really messes with your head, e.g. when the floor drops you reach out to grab onto something!.” It’s pretty awesome. I hope to get some more details on the particulars soon….they’ll be releasing a “how it’s done” video soon…..

UPDATE: Memo explains with the following: “For the launch of the Sony PlayStation Video Store, our job was to bring a living room alive with hints at various hollywood blockbuster franchises – so we decided to push projection mapping to a new level. We projection mapped a living room space with camera (or head)
tracking and dynamic perspective. All content realtime 3D, camera (or head) is tracked to
match and update the 3D perspective in realtime to the viewers point of view. Add to this real
props, live puppetry, interaction between the virtual and physical worlds, a mixture of hi-tech
and lo-tech live special effects, a little bit of pyrotechnics and a lot of late nights.
Shot with a Steadicam MK-V AR rig. This is similar to a stabilized technocrane head on the
end of a Steadicam which allowed shots from 6 inches off the floor to 9ft in the air. Its far
more complicated, tricky and needless to say heavier to work with than a regular Steadicam
rig but the shots possible are phenomenal. The true 3D-ness of the projection mapping
needed to be shot from many different angles and heights to demonstrate it properly but also
in one take. The Steadicam MK-V AR is the only way all these angles could have been shot
smoothly in one continuous take.
The project is driven using custom software based on the Unity Engine, here all the realtime
3D content was animated and triggered, and mapped onto the geometry. Camera (and head)
tracking was done on the PlayStation3 using PlayStation Move controllers and PlayStation
Eye cameras, and communicated to our Unity application via ethernet. Six projectors were
used to cover the area: 6x Optoma EW610ST, and the open-source Syphon Framework was
used to to communicate between our Unity based 3D and mapping software, and our custom
native Cocoa application to output to all projectors.”

Agency: Studio Output
Directors: Robin McNicholas (Flat-e), Barney Steel (FND), Memo Akten (MSA)
Cameraman / AR: Thomas English
Music: Finn McNicholas/Si Begg
Client: Sony PS3 Video Store
Production Company: Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF)

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Technorati Tags: 3d, digital media, entertainment technology, HD, projection mapping, videomapping