Spontaneous Fantasia VR concerts in Fulldome
J-Walt is the world’s premier fulldome performer. He’s been amazing audiences with his Spontaneous Fantasia shows in hundreds of performances worldwide for nearly ten years, and in fulldome since 2007.
There isn’t another performer anywhere in the world like J-Walt. He creates 3D scenes, sculptures, creatures — entire worlds — in real-time as audiences watch spellbound. He is a magician who seems to conjure images out of thin air. His shows have been compared to Pink Floyd light shows or Laserium, but updated for the 21st century.
Each of J-Walt’s pieces has a particular theme, and each is accompanied by a dramatic cinematic electronic soundtrack. Much of the show is inspired by astronomical phenomenon and science fiction illustration, including his longer pieces, “Autocosm: Gardens of Thuban” and “The Omnicentric Universe”. The presentations are created on-the-fly, allowing J-Walt to improvise within each piece. Like a jazz musician exploring the possibilities within a song, each performance is unique.
Photo by Steve Savage
Watch the following demo videos and keep in mind that all the graphics is being generated live. There is no pre-rendered content. The shows use state-of-the-art interactive and graphic techniques to create geometries and animation with a new level of freedom. He’s currently (as of February, 2014) at work on his 3rd generation full-length show.
Except for these occasional demo videos, J-Walt never saves his performances. For him, it keep his movies from becoming precious or too rehearsed. It adds another level of spontaneity, and allows J-Walt free to change the show and give an audience a fresh, unique variation each time.
The key to J-Walt’s magic is his custom real-time system which he himself developed and continues to expand. It’s a hardware/software system that he’s programmed (in C++ and Python), and which allows him to perform in any video theater at any resolution. J-Walt creates live movies at 60 fps, without counting frames or pixels.
In 2007, J-Walt worked with developers at Sky-Skan to make his system work in fulldome. Since J-Walt’s worlds were already immersive 3D and not just a flat 2D image, it was a natural progression to expand the image borders to full immersion.
A high-res fulldome theater creates images using multiple video projector and networked PCs, J-Walt made a version of his software that works across a network of GPUs. Now, he travels around the globe and performs in digital planetariums. For planetariums that have Sky-Skan’s Digital Sky software, J-Walt’s software is plug-and-play. The software interfaces with Sky-Skan’s to take advantage of the projector configuration that’s already in place.
Photo by Steve Savage
With this technology, there’s no limit to the resolution or size of display. All the images are generated at whatever resolution the theater can produce. At the high-end, J-Walt has performed several shows at the Macao Science Center’s planetarium, which boasts the world’s highest-resolution 3D dome. The image is 8000 x 8000 pixels doubled for 3D and projected by 12 ultra high resolution digital projectors driven by 48 powerful graphic computers running his software in sync.
J-Walt has performed or demonstrated in planetarium theaters in these cities:
Chicago – San Francisco – Hong Kong – Macao
Glendale, California – Boston – Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Hamburg – Cupertino, California – Amsterdam
Anchorage, Alaska – Albuquerque, New Mexico
Warsaw – San Diego – Edmonton – Philadelphia
