Fulldome UK 2022

At the start of November, I got the chance to go back to Fulldome UK held at the Market Hall in Plymouth (A really cool venue with a really cool dome!).

This time there was the opportunity to create a couple of interactive demos to show off a couple of ideas for how to use the dome in an interactive way.

We only had a couple of days to make these so we came up with a couple of small demos, one using the Azure Kinect to make a fun demo using Unity and the VFX graph, this was mainly influenced by the fact that we had just used the Azure Kinects in a project this year and had a couple of spares in the office.

This was a very simple demo that just used the depth data from the Kinect fed into some VFX Graphs, envisioned as a way to let people interact with the dome without any onboarding.

The other demo we went with was a multiplayer VR game that could be spectated on the dome as a way to get a whole audience involved. The concept behind it was that the dome could be used as a new way to watch E-Sport events and get the audience right in the action.

The premise was that two people would put on a VR headset and get sent into a sci-fi space station arena, where they would have to shoot it out to get the highest score.

This demo was mainly based on a previous VR preview tool that I had previously made, refitted to display on a dome over NDI. I also created a set of camera controls so that the camera could be directed to get the best view of the action, all the while smoothing it out to not make the spectators feel sick.

Overall, the experience was a lot of fun and it was cool to make some short projects as a break from the long term one I was primarily on. It was a 4-day turnaround for both of these demos, with a trip down to Plymouth from Leicester and a day of watching some cool films on the dome thrown in there for good measure.