Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, chief designer of the facility, composer, and media artist with over thirty filve years of experience in media systems engineering, outlines the vision for our research.
Etherial: A Quantum Composition & Installation featured at ISEA, Gwangju, Republic of Korea. Also can be viewed at the California NanoSystems Institute's AlloPortal and AlloSphere.
Our Team is led by Dr. Kuchera-Morin (Director, Inventor, & Lead Researcher) of the Allosphere Research Group. Dr. Andres Cabrera as Media Systems Engineer, Dennis Adderton as Technical Director. And the AlloSphere Team.
The AlloSphere seeks corporate - industry and academic - institutional partnerships on short- and long-term collaborative projects.
The AlloSphere provides support for any software development or media production pipeline. Collaborators may use the AlloSphere for media production purposes by implementing their creative pipeline on the AlloSphere infrastructure. The AlloSphere is a powerful and scalable tool for research and discovery of possible immersive experiences in any content area.
The AlloSphere is the only large scale installation with full surround omni-stereo rendering, combined with 54 channel spatial audio, making it possible to create an immersive experience not possible anywhere else in the world. This can be useful for optimizing the editing and mixdown for immersive platforms, or may be used as an exploratory tool to navigate the parameter space of the content and develop the optimal representation for immersion across platforms.
Collaborators can conduct focus groups and user studies, demonstrate content to creators and producers, or test new immersive and interactive technologies. The AlloSphere supports easy software deployment with Desktop Mode, which can provide a 360 degree cylindrical view in omni-stereo from a single computer with powerful GPUs and plenty of CPU power to handle any media task. Content can then be scaled up by deploying on our cluster of rendering machines to fully spherical 3D immersion, interaction, and spatial audio.
Corporate/industry/university affiliates work alongside UC Santa Barbara faculty and advanced graduate students to conduct basic research, publish results, and showcase their data visually and aurally in the 3D, 360-degree immersive AlloSphere Research Facility. The AlloPortal Research Facility is available to also showcase visually and aurally in a 3D, 100-degree immersive environments.
Rates & Usage
Summary
We supply a flexible platform offering desktop environments that support many production tools including readiness for video, audio, and gaming pipelines. All other customized tools requiring development will be discussed on a case by case basis depending on need.
The AlloSphere can initiate formal collaborations that enable facility usage through per organization contractual agreements.
The AlloSphere cluster is on a private secured network behind a firewall. Data necessary for full-surround display is distributed locally across the render cluster. Sensitive data can be managed by its owner and removed from the system when desired.
4) Tool Support
Timeline - Unreal Engine Support
Coming (Summer 2024): A Spatial Audio Plugin
Coming (Fall 2024): A Full surround Render Plugin
Audio
Motu AVB devices driving 54.1 channel audio system
Motu AVB Control Web Application
Mac desktop environment supporting common DAWs and plugins.
Windows desktop environment also available to drive audio
AlloSphere Spatial Audio Player
Allolib custom spatial audio API (C++)
Coming Soon: Unreal Engine Spatial Audio Plugin
Visual
Windows / Linux desktop environment covering 360 cylindrical view enabling all content via single render node.
Interactive Full-surround display via 14 node Linux render cluster and Allolib graphics API (C++)
