Sphere and the Big Sky Camera
PhilNote; This sounds like incredible hardware, and our friend Andrew Shulkind was the driving force.
... The resulting Big Sky camera fea-tures an 18K sensor that measures 77.5mm x 75.6mm (3.05"x2.98"); the system is capable of capturing images at 120 fps and transfer-ring data at 60 gigabytes per second. ...
An additional complication was that the audience’s natural vision inside the Sphere places the most important part of the image in the lower quarter of the screen; this is the most comfortable viewing angle, one that doesn’t require craning your neck to look up. There is still a considerable amount of image above the audience’s head, though — so, when a typical scene is shot, the camera must be con-stantly tilted at 55 degrees to capture an angle of view that fills the entire screen, with the “center” of the action framed through the lower edge of the lens. ...
For Sphere, the team had to create a 165-degree-horizontal-angle-of-view fisheye lens with an edge-to-edge performance exceeding 60-percent MTF at 100 line-pairs — an extraordinary feat for any photographic lens. The result is a lens the size of a dinner plate, ...
The Sphere Immersive Sound system, developed in partnership with the German company Holoplot, involves 167,000 speakers that direct sound to the audience like a laser beam — and with nearly the same precision. The system not only delivers delay-free and echo-free sound to all seats, but it can also create wholly immersive 3D audio by placing a sound in any position in 3D space. ...
Further, the system can deliver an entirely different soundtrack, in various languages, to different positions in the theater. So, within a small group of seats, one viewer can listen to a French soundtrack while the neighboring viewer hears English — both in perfect sync with the picture. ...
Sphere currently has 10 Big Sky cameras, and there are more coming. ...
Our goal is to use this technology to take people to new places they haven’t been before and make them feel as if they had been,” Shulkind concludes. “For movies, 4K is good enough. With Sphere, good enough isn’t good enough anymore.”
Read the full article here: https://theasc.com/articles/sphere-and-the-big-sky-camera
