Engineering - Musion

On Wednesday Emily (Sponsorship & Branding), Kat (Branding), David (Talent Showdown Producer), Dave and I went up to Regents Park to visit Musion.

Musion are the world leaders in 3D holographic projection systems and what we saw during their demonstration was fairly incredible, the basic idea is that an HD image is projected onto a transparent foil which makes it appear as if it were floating in mid air. The image can then be interacted with by a rehearsed presenter providing a very realistic holographic feel to the set-up.

The idea for Rave Live would be to to have this holographic set-up on the main stage and use it to present channel listings and student animations, along hosting the initial opening to the event. There was also another idea to provide some kind of live 'telepresence' (making a person appear as a hologram) for which we would need to provide the camera.

Dave and I went along to view this from a more technical perspective and as such we were looking at the real-time implications behind using Musion on the day, as such we came up with a list of pros and cons:

Pros:

• Looks really good when it is shot and filmed well

• They will provide the equipment to achieve this and also the man power to rig it up

• They will provide some help to us when filming and producing the content for this

• They can do it with a feed of HDSDI which we can achieve with a HDX900 from stores

• If we can include this in one of the shows as an insert then it will look really professional and engage the audience really well

Cons:

• It needs a lot of light for it to work and also it needs a light show to be effective

• The equipment that they will bring is heavy which will put some restrictions on our shows rigs due to weight

• It will take 6+ hours to rig which eats into a whole days rigging time, assuming that we cannot rig around them on the stage so this cuts the stages rig time by a day

• The screen is expensive and can be broken, with students on and off stage all the time there would be a possibility that it could get broken

• It works best with high contrast meaning there should be as little light off the stage as possible. With the venue being used as an exhibition as well there will be a lot of light spilling onto the stage

• We're not sure how this will fit into the schedule, with the shows on stage and the time needed for the turn around will there be time to show anything on this?

• We do not have the content yet, it seems a little bit too late to be making content now

Obviously a lot of these points require us liaising with representatives from Musion, especially the items concerning the actual rig. The idea is to start doing this as soon as management have decided how they wish to proceed and whether or not we will actually be using Musion.