SOMNAI runs until late July at 2 Pear Street, London
UK - London's hit new immersive experience, SOMNAI, is tripping out visitors with its dreamlike visuals mapped onto a perspective bending dome at the heart of the production using Avolites Ai's Autoblend feature.
SOMNAI is the latest project from dotdotdot, in collaboration with a host of video content and AV specialists including long-time Ai expert, GaiaNova. The British 360° dome mapping specialist acted as the production's dome system integrator.
"We knew that Avolites' Ai Infinity R6 media server was the right choice for this project, loaded with v10 software and its essential Autoblend feature," says Ben Stern from GaiaNova. "Autoblend is a complete game-changer in how you map domes. It simplifies the entire process and the results are amazing. It's so good that trying to do it any other way is unthinkable - I wouldn't map a dome using anything else."
SOMNAI takes visitors to a place 'where hyper-reality and virtual reality meet - a live, multi-sensory experience with immersive technologies'. The audience is guided into a room where they are told a bedtime story before falling into a hypnotic, dream-like state and asked to put on VR headsets. When they remove the VR gear, the roof of the space has retracted to reveal the huge dome, displaying trippy video sequences. A journey into the subconscious begins.
"Projecting rectangles onto a curved surface might not sound easy, but with Autoblend it just works," Stern continues. "With a bit of programming and visualisation the Ai server does most of the work for you and you have a seamless visual, a single image spread across multiple projectors."
The mind-altering video content was designed by Immersive, while the audio aspects were created by experiential audio FX company Mixed Immersion.
(Jim Evans)

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