This creative startup wants to bring The Sphere experience to the high street

Immersive digital art has become a huge draw, from touring Van Gogh exhibits to the vast multi-sensory spectacle of the Sphere. The tech behind such experiences is generally expensive and out of reach for smaller artists and spaces, but one startup hopes to see that change.

Visual Endeavors is a creative tech studio based in Santa Cruz, California. Describing itself as “half nerds, half creatives”, it creates interactive installations and generative content, but it also has its own hardware solutions. That includes PixelCannon, a software-agnostic media server tuned to power real-time rendered video and LED installations.

Now as part of Hovercraft Ventures, founder Aron Altmark hopes to realise more ambitious ideas, including bringing immersive art to more public spaces.

An artist at heart, Aron studied lighting for theatre and dance at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. He then discovered electronic music and ended up going tour with Tiesto. Flash forward, and Visual Endeavors has led him to work on things like the real-time video effects to put the Backstreet Boys in space during their residency at The Sphere.

"All of that is an intricate layering of real-time video feeds and rendered video,” Aron says. “The Sphere is a crazy canvas. We brought a stack of our PixelCannon machines and had them sitting in a room turning out renders. You can't do this stuff on laptops it's incredibly processing intensive and difficult to do”.

The PixelCannon is essentially a powerful workstation with an advanced CPU and GPU and a ruggardised. design. As a Nvidia Inception startup, the company can get its hands on next-gen GPUs when they come out and tune its hardware for real-time rendering and large scale content output. PixelCannon is available for rental, making it relatively inexpensive for limited-time events.

“The whole idea of PixelCannon is to have an in-house technical tool that enables us to do bigger, better and cooler work, and it democratises the process,” Aron explains. “From the perspective of a graphic artist, I didn't want to take no for an answer. I wanted to unlock these crazy technologies.

“There are other products on the market already, but they're software embedded. Ours is software agnostic, so we can leverage Notch, Unreal Engine, TouchDesigner.”

Clients typically come to Visual Endeavors with a desire to stage an innovative, real-time experience but not knowing how to do it. So the team comes up with a pipeline and tech stack to make it work.

"When we're doing some of these really ambitious projects, we can't go out and buy 3 quarters of a million dollars of media server hardware, and our clients can't always do that either. We're servicing some clients that want to build these cool interactive spaces for $30,000 - $40,000.”

Although it's worked on huge concerts, much of Visual Endeavors' experience is in finding innovative solutions for smaller events. The company has a studio at the former Wrigley gum factory in Santa Cruz. Kitted out with projectors, depth sensors, speakers, lights and tracking systems, it's a community space where the company can experiment with ideas for shared experiences in intimate spaces.

A recent project at the Louvre for Paris Fashion Week entailed setting up a system to track clothing as models moved. That involved to embedding tracking markers in flexible fabric so as to generate projections that looked like they were sticking to the fabric.

Another experiment was the creation of a virtual air hockey table through a real-time physics simulation. The company made hockey sticks embedded with BlackTrax Beacons with spatial tracking technology so data could be taken into the rendering software Notch and then output to the projected table.

“I find this idea of public gamification and experiences really fun, and I find that this is what people get excited about,” Aron says. “I have children, and they get screens and interfaces. They know they're something they can touch and feel. They know what streams are. It's innate to their understanding of the world, so it's fun to see this on different scales”.

In terms of future trends, Aron's excited about the possibilities of finding ways to make large scale shows span locations. But his biggest hope is to make access to innovative digital art more attainable.

Tickets for The Sphere or even for a regular stadium concert aren't available for everyone. Aron cites outdoor festivals like Blink Cincinnati – “very cool but so short” – and Montreal's embedding of art in public places as things he'd like to see more of.

"I don't think it's necessarily an augmented reality headset thing. Headsets are alienating. They don't drive collective experience. But when we find ways to make this type of immersive experience more accessible and more prolific, it's going to be very fun and lead to more of this whimsical kind of art.

“As an artist, I think creative art in unexpected public spaces is so cool. Finding ways to experience this in lobbies and hotels, and on the street; that's a trend I'm seeing and that we're diving into with this idea of interactive experiences.”

Part of the challenge in making that happen is funding, but Aron thinks that despite technological costs, novel digital formats have advantages there.

“Art should be expensive. Everyone has to make a living. But I'd love to see is more opportunities for it. The cool thing about a screen versus a sculpture is that we can rotate work. Maybe this is almost the the next iteration of the idea of the NFT. It makes things more accessible and makes it so that you can have artwork on display in a higher concentration at less of a cost.

“I also love the conversation you can evoke. There are great painters, but traditional art is more of a one-way-ish conversation. You deduce what the artist is intending and decide how you feel about it. With interactive and experiential art, I find it's faster to get to this kind of catharsis where you walk into a space and you're driving your own experience.”

Aron insists that this doesn't make artists' role any less crucial. The technology is only the facilitator, even in these times of gen AI.

“Technology on it's own doesn't do anything. People already get the tech. Audiences are spoiled now. They've seen fireworks, drone shows, crazy lighting. If you look at the Sphere, there's some crazy stuff that happens in there, and people expect that now. Using the tech isn't enough; you have to figure out new and cool things to do with it.”

Having been acquired by Hovercraft Ventures should help Visual Endeavors realise some of its most ambitious visions. The venture platform already comprises an eponymous creative studio specialising in immersive experiences and spatial computing along with production studio Raw Cereal and the UK-based advertising and marketing agency OMM. Becoming part of that brings the scale and resources to explore new avenues and a chance to strike up new partnerships.

“I think it's not going to change anything except maybe in a bit of a scary way,” Aron thinks. “When I have ideas that are too big and crazy, now I can call up the partners. I think now we're going to be able to do some really fun things that we would have been prevented from doing as the small guy.”

You can learn more about Visual Endeavors' work on its website.