I spent the last week with my friends and colleagues at the Ars Electronica Center and their amazing immersive DeepSpace8K theater in Linz, Austria. This unique 3D immersive venue is powered by the same Uniview software I’ve been developing content and programs for over the last decade.
The DeepSpace8K team and I got to know each other as I helped them solve technical challenges with the software that limited their storytelling. Subsequently, they hosted me for special Uniview presentations at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
For the last two years we’ve been discussing developing a collaborative program together, and we finally got to dive into the production last week! Since we wanted to use some of the unique features of OpenSpace, we spent most of this time as a workshop to transfer my knowledge and experience with the software to their team, turning them into power users over the coure of a week.
To prepare, I developed a multi-day training program and tutorial guidebook with hundreds of pages of illustrated instructions for OpenSpace. This merged my years of experience running shorter workshops with more comprehensive staff training to quickly build the technical skills for content development.
Together, we also deployed additional software tools and scripts to smooth OpenSpace operations in DeepSpace8K, troubleshot and solved some issues, and took a look at some tweaks and content for their legacy Sciss-era Uniview installation too.
Getting to support colleagues and institutions to tell the science stories of their dreams through the power of realtime software systems is exactly what I hoped I could do by starting Tau Immersive. It was great to be there as the team was literally shouting with joy as we began to pull the first elements of this program together. I can’t wait to see (and share) the final product and what they’ll continue to achieve with their new skills!
