An immersive existence simulator and telepresence apparatus

Enter the Panoscope 360° to be fully immersed in a 3D world. A 3-axis joystick will let you and your friends (up to 8) fly through the space as in dreams. The immersive display uses a PC and a hemispheric projector to project in real time a rendering of your entire horizon onto the screen.

In Where are you? visitors are invited to fly, as in dreams, through a world of many dimensions, using a joystick to move in the X, Y and Z axis of a space where scale matters.

At scale 0, the world looks like a simple XYZ grid defining the experience of the navigable space. At scale +1, the world turns into an archive of pictures, sounds, texts and objects. Zooming out at scale +2, elements of this archive become particles in a "molecular" world of self-organizing clouds of lights. Zooming yet further out at scale +3 reveals a landscape of mountains and valleys.

At any moment in the Where are you? world, visitors may come upon other beings: live ones through telepresence links, pre-recorded subjects in video windows and themselves when cameras transmit their own image in this constructed world. In Where are you? the visitor controls his/her position, the path and speed of his/her journey and the scale at which he/she is prepared to "exist".

Where are you? is an attempt at re-enchanting the world.

By Montreal-based artist Luc Courchesne.

Video demo.