Sesqui VR-360 Waterball

This is a long and complex story. One of the many projects sponsored by the Canadian government for Canada’s 150th birthday, was a VR experience lab called Sesqui. Joel McConvey at Sesqui invited me to work with them to create a VR 360 piece as part of their Meridian Project: an online VR experience. I had never worked with VR … in fact I had never seen any, so I had a lot of catching up to do. But very quickly, my first and only idea was to create a sphere, like a geodesic dome, and for the viewer to be inside that sphere, watching projected film clips of moving water that move in patterns all around them.

If you are already familiar with VR and want to cut to the chase and see it, search for the app “SESQUI MERIDIAN VR” on the Play store (Android for Cardboard), the App store (iOS) or the Oculus store (Gear VR).
(More detailed instructions are here.)

When you run it, after it starts up, my Waterball is the icon on the far, far left. A triangle with watery lines in it. Click on it or stare at it, then click on or stare at “Play” and you’re in. It runs for 3 minutes, then loops.

The closest thing to this I had done previously was “Mountain Spectrum” for Tourism BC. But where that was flat, this was spherical; and where that was mountains this was water; and that was still while this was moving.

When I proposed it to Joel I expected him to say “impossible”, but instead he said “I think we can do this!”

They built this sphere, and then sent me the flat map of it. I had 44 video clips of water that I had been shooting and collecting for several years, and I needed to map them onto 122 triangles of the geodesic sphere, showing where they would come in, what direction they would face, and when they would be replaced by a new clip.

I took screenshots of all the clips and marked the position and direction of the triangular shape I wanted used from that clip. Below are some of the pages from my booklet of instructions (note, the date should say 2017, not 2016).

Then I made a timeline (several pages long) showing what clips were running, when:

Then I did a map of each time transition, showing what clips went where, with each colour coded, and a dot on the triangle to show the direction of the clip (some flowed inwards, some flowed outwards, some flowed around a hexagram). There were many, many pages of this:

It got pretty nuts. Each time I sent them more steps I expected them to say “Wait! Whoa! This is way crazier than we thought!” But they never did. They sent me a test of the first 15 seconds.

After they built the first test of the ball, there were some errors, and some changes I wanted to make. I redid the map-making, this time fading out the colours on everything except the pieces in question so it wasn’t so confusing:

Then they sent me the complete ball. So exciting! But still there were some errors, so I needed to do one more round of instructions to fix those.

The final step was to add music. They hired Scott Morgan, aka loscil, an ambient music artist from Vancouver to do the music. He created a generative soundscape of ambient and water sounds that changes each time you view the ball.

The final result was exactly what I had had in mind. Being inside the ball with the music is hypnotic, trippy and calming. There are six views (top, bottom, and four “sides”) in which something different is happening all the time. You could view it and relax and hang out, or you could do drugs and trip out. You can look at one view the whole time, or look around. It runs for 3 minutes, fades to black and then loops again.

Big big thanks to Mike McDougall and Mike Despault for the programming.

The only down side was that because it streams on the web, compression was an issue and the clips did suffer for it. It’s still beautiful though.

To see it, search for the app “SESQUI MERIDIAN VR” on the Play store (Android for Cardboard), the App store (Apple iOS) or the Oculus store (Gear VR).
(More detailed instructions are here.)

When you run it, after it starts up, my Waterball is the icon on the far, far left. A triangle with watery lines in it. Click on it or stare at it, then click on or stare at “Play” and you’re in. It runs for 3 minutes, then loops.

If you don’t know anything at all about VR or what you need, this is a good beginners guide. Scroll down for the less expensive options (I’ve been viewing this on a Samsung Gear VR, with a Samsung Galaxy 6 phone). It can also be viewed with the very cheap Google cardboard on more recent iPhones and many others.