The Future of Cinema - SMG Solutions review 'The Satosphere'

Sept. 24, 2012 - PRLog -- 'The Satosphere' is an experimental cinema located in a building that began life as an actual meat market.

Before that particular stretch of lower Boulevard Saint-Laurent took a turn for the carnal. The shiny new glass façade stands in stark contrast to the neighboring buildings but what truly marks the Satosphere as a new kind of spectacle is the massive dome protruding from the roof.

Eighteen metres in diameter, the three-month-old Satosphere is a round cinema, but unlike similar planetarium theatres of old it uses a hi-tech network of eight video projectors and 157 speakers to completely surround! u The effect isn’t 3D in the sense of images popping out of the screen whilst your wearing glasses. Rather, it gives viewers the sense of moving inside the images even, during particularly kinetic sequences.

People have made domed theatres before but strangely enough, they still tried to make the viewer look only at the front, like in a regular cinema. The Satosphere differs and move's away from that by not having fixed seating. The intention is for people to be able to walk around, to choose their point of view, both by their body position and what captures their interest. Two viewers standing back-to-back in the Satosphere would see, and possibly hear, completely different things, making the experience as much about what you miss as what you catch. Sound overwhelming? That’s kind of the point.!

Researchers in the SAT labs spent three years experimenting with the best way to capture and project images. The process starts by creating 360-degree video footage, either by using a six-lens camera (similar to those used by Google to create its Street View maps) to record a real environment, or by computer modelling entirely virtual scenes.
The footage is then rendered into a “flattened” image that is texture-mapped over the virtual surface of a 3D object in this case, the curved walls of the Satosphere making exacting adjustments to the image to compensate for any distortion that normally occurs during projection onto a non-flat surface. It takes about four hours to import one minute of  footage, but editing, colour correction and other tweaks add considerably to the process. It takes about a year to create two hours of polished video. Throughout the process, footage is test-screened in the laboratory’s miniature dome, which holds a handful of viewers. Once the video works there, it’s ready for the big room.

The Satosphere is actually two domes: an immobile one that protrudes through the roof, and the slightly smaller projection dome that nests inside. The projection dome is a steel frame panelled with thin sheets of perforated aluminum. (The holes, which prevent sound from echoing and distorting, account for almost a quarter of the surface area, but are small enough not to affect viewing.) Special paint prevents too much light from reflecting back from the panels (too much reflection would spoil the image on the opposite side of the sphere) while still allowing high contrast for the projections.

The eight projectors are grouped in pairs near the top of the dome. The highest projectors are angled down to cover the lower half of the screen; the lower projectors point up. Each projected image overlaps with the next by about a foot, but painstaking projector alignments, and a formidable rack of computers, make for a seamless 360-degree panorama that fills every millimetre of the room.

Every millimetre. That’s the important part.

The Satosphere opened in October, 2011, with a performance called Intérieur. Live dancers, choreographed by Marie-Claude Poulin, moved among the audience and interacted with a two-hour video by artist Martin Kusch. (As if navigating through a dance troupe wasn’t enough sensory overload for audiences, a later performance called Salon de massage McLuhan, inspired by the legendary Canadian media theorist, incorporated narrative-appropriate tastes and smells courtesy of the adjacent “Foodlab.”)