In 2016 I was given a brief to build a "multi-video" renderer, for exploring the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. After some research, experimentation and thought this became a VR demo showing Edinburgh "on a tabletop".

It's a room-scale VR demo built in Unreal Engine 4 for the HTC Vive. A map of Edinburgh is shown on a "virtual tabletop" and "windows" into 360-degree video scenes are projected on top. Each scene works like a real window; the view changes as you move your head, sounds start coming through as you get close, and if you put your head through (by selecting it with the controller) you end up in a 360 video player. The model can also be rotated and zoomed using the Vive controllers.

The idea was to come up with a novel way to explore the Festival. When you're there you get a sense of the city coming alive, of a performance everywhere you look and more to see than hours in the day! I wanted to try and capture some of that experience from afar.

I was also part of a small (2-person) team filming 360 content at the Fringe. We used a mixture of a Ricoh Theta rig (left) for previsualisation and blocking and a Freedom 360 Broadcaster (right) for high-quality work. This was coupled with the creative use of another 360 rig to shoot ground plates and a Zoom H2N for spatial sound. Finally, some GearVR headsets helped get some of the artists and performers on board with the idea of 360 filming, by showing them their performances in a headset. I also stitched the material using the now-defunct Kolor Autopano Video.

The project was exhibited at the TVX2017 conference