THIS YEAR AT Coachella the biggest spectacle wasn’t Radiohead, Kendrick Lamar, or even Lady Gaga. It wasn’t Selena Gomez and the Weeknd’s PDA, either. Instead, it was a massive dome where attendees could see giant neon caterpillars, alien landings, and geometric shapes pulsing through the cosmos—no hallucinogens required.
Chrysalis, as the show in the dome is called, is a virtual reality trip very different from the goggle-enabled VR most folks are familiar with. Instead of crushing their flower crowns with a headset, Coachella attendees watched the eight-minute show projected onto the ceiling of a 60-foot high rotunda. All they had to do was lean back and look up.
The experience is the work of Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based studio that spent three months developing Chrysalis. The result of their efforts is a steel and vinyl dome outfitted with 108 speakers, 15 projectors, and 500 seats that immerses viewers in a classic psychedelic story: the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. “When you sit back inside this giant dome, it’s a chrysalis cocoon that transforms the experience of being at a festival to a realm within realms,” says Emmett Feldman, art director at Obscura.
Although Obscura had done large-scale visual projects before—the company created an immersive 360-degree sphere in Dubai and built a dome for NASA honoring the Space Shuttle Program, for example—the Coachella job was something entirely new, and required two teams working in tandem to complete: a creative team, which worked on the video aspects, and a tech team that developed the dome itself. While the creative folks worked on CGI and went to Joshua Tree to capture long-exposure footage of the desert, the tech group developed the tools to project it—practicing with a 30-foot test dome in the San Francisco office while a sister company, Pacific Domes, built the big version in Ashland, Oregon.
,
Source: wired