After finishing work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I had the opportunity to work with ILM's Virtual Production department on a project which would eventually lead to my transfer to ILMxLAB to work on real-time graphics in the context of virtual- and augmented-reality.
Our project, The Holo-Cinema, debuted at the New Frontier exhibition of the Sundance Film Festival 2016 (https://www.sundance.org/projects/the-holo-cinema). The Holo-Cinema is an exploration into how one might consume stories in the future. The viewer wears a pair of stereoscopic glasses which are tracked in real-time by a motion capture system. The viewer's head position is then used as a camera into the virtual world and their custom viewpoint is projected onto the walls and floor around the viewer to create an illusion of presence in the virtual scene. This technology is more commonly known by the recursive acronym "CAVE," short for "cave automatic virtual environment." Being inside a CAVE is like being inside of a hologram, as seen to the right in the video of BB-8 rolling around.
The Holo-Cinema team setting up.
I was responsible for the lighting and scene assembly for our Jakku scene, as well as helping set up and tear down the various infrared cameras, computers, and projectors which were used for the capture, rendering, and playback of the experience. I was also on-site for the duration of the Sundance Film Festival as an operator for our exhibit and helped usher thousands of people through our experience over he course of the festival.
The image to the left is a behind-the-scenes view of our team setting up the experience. To the right of frame you can see our portable compute system and at the top of frame you could see the various cameras and projectors in the ceiling. Finally, you could see how the final projected image looks from an outsider's point of view.