From the previous bounds of the proscenium tradition – the flat, rectangular space defined by screens and theaters – audiovisuals increasingly sprawl into surround. One superb example comes to us from Seppo Gruendler of Austria.

The project combines multiple “surround” technologies across multiple media. Projection is mapped across screens for wraparound visuals, but sound, too – via ambisonics – extends to 360-degrees.

It’s especially nice to see the full-length video embedded at bottom, for a better sense of what they did.

The team:

Peter Venus, Marian Weger, Cyrille Henry, Winfried Ritsch, Simon Veronegg

This project was supported by IEM- Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics
and COMEDIA- COoperation and MEdiation in DIgital Arts

Users (or prospective users) of the powerful, free and open source graphical patching environment Pure Data (Pd) will be pleased to know that you can take advantage of a big collection of abstractions built for this piece. The Extended View Toolkit combines a range of abstractions, managing multiple video and image sources, panoramic projection, video streaming, and OSC control:

Extended View Toolkit

Good stuff, and free. For a good argument for why you should use it, though, check out the full-length work: