#1399: Cosm Opens Front-Facing Dome Venue with Capacity of 1500 in Los Angeles

Cosm is a front-facing, 180-degree, 87-foot diameter, 8K+ LED dome screen that can seat up to 1500 people. Their first location is opening in Los Angeles this weekend showing UFC 303, which is produced by their Cosm Immersive division (formerly LiveLikeVR) focusing on live sporting events, music, entertainment. They also have a Cosm Studios division that will continue to produce educational content for their network of planetariums, but also developing new forms of immersive art and immersive stories. Cosm Studios has been working with different XR artists over the past number of years in order to translate their work into either full dome planetariums or front-facing dome venues (with a second location opening in the future outside of Dallas, Texas).

The Madison Square Garden Sphere opened up in Las Vegas on September 29, 2023 and has a seating capacity of around 18,600 people. Cosm is on a much smaller scale of a venue at 1500 people that allows them to be a bit more experimental with the types of immersive art, immersive stories, and immersive content as well as live sporting events to fill up their venue. Cosm listed a number of their content partnerships in a LinkedIn post from a couple of months ago where they said, “Transforming live sports and entertainment, Cosm LA invites you to experience the biggest and best live sports from ESPN, the National Basketball Association (NBA), Ultimate Fighting Championship, TNT Sports U.S., and NBC Sports in immersive 8K+. In addition to live sports, Cosm LA will showcase music, entertainment such as Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group, and immersive art experiences from our Cosm Studios Creators Nancy Baker Cahill, Chris Holmes, Ricardo Romaneiro, and Guy Reid of PLANETARY COLLECTIVE.”

I had a chance to catch up with the head of Cosm Studios Neil Carty as well as the Senior Director of Studio Development for Cosm Studios Katy Yudin last year at Tribeca Immersive 2023 in order to get the backstory for how Cosm came about as well as how they’ve been working with immersive artists and immersive storytellers over the past couple of years to translate their XR projects to work in these different dome formats. You can check out Cosm’s upcoming events that includes sporting events and world premieres of immersive content like “O” by Cirque du Soleil on July 11, LIQUIDVERSE: Microcosm & Macrocosm on July 12, Orbital on July 17, and SEEK on July 18.

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Music: https://d1icj85yqthyoq.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Voices-of-VR-1399-Neil-Carty-Katy-Yudin.mp3

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So last year at Tribeca Immersive, I had a chance to catch up with a couple of folks from Cosm Studios. So Cosm is doing a number of different front-facing, half-dome, stadium-type of venues. They're opening one up actually tomorrow. june 29th 2024 in los angeles and they're also opening one at some point just outside of dallas texas and so the sphere opened up on september 29th 2023 and this is like a big giant led screen in las vegas there's 17 000 to 18 000 people that they have to sell for each of the different shows that they have so they open up with youtube they have fish grateful dead So it's at a much larger scale. The seating capacity at some of these Cosm videos are going to be around 1500. So they have a lot more leeway to be experimental with the different types of content that is going to find their core audience. And so they're doing stuff with like live events. They've partnered with like ESPN and BC Sports, TNT Sports, the NBA, the UFC. So they're actually opening up tomorrow on Saturday, June 29th, 2024 for UFC 303. It's a fighting event where it's going to be doing like a live stream broadcast into this big half dome front facing that's going to have like 1500 people there. They have like three main parts of their venue, they have the dome, they have the hall, and they have the rooftop deck. So there's different places that are in these venues. And the idea is just to be a little bit more experimental with live sporting events, live entertainment, and other immersive art and stories and entertainment that they're also going to be experimenting with. So I had a chance to talk with a couple of folks from Cosm Studios, both Neil and Katie, who were going to a lot of these different film festivals and interacting with artists and filmmakers from these festivals to see if they're interested in translating some of their immersive art into this half dome or planetarium experience, because they also have a network of planetariums that they're able to also project out and something that is either front facing or something that you're more looking up. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Neil and Katie happened on Tuesday, June 13th, 2023. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:30.126] Neil Carty: Hi, I'm Neil Carty. I'm the head of Cosm Studios and Labs, and I run all the non-live sports, narrative, experiential cinema, immersive art, everything in between for our Cosm venues and across the Full Dome network, as well as headsets.

[00:02:44.518] Kent Bye: And Cosm stands for what?

[00:02:46.601] Neil Carty: Cosm is the name of, we're a leading media, technology, and entertainment company. But also, if you dig deep into it, it's sort of a blend between the cosmos and Colosseum, where it's a combination of essentially the experiences that we're building for the world.

[00:03:01.604] Katy Yudin: I'm Katie Yudin and I'm the director of studio development on the Cosm Studios team. So working alongside Neil, really overseeing the development of a ton of our projects, both internally with our talent across Cosm companies, as well as working with the creator community, the creator immersive community and funding some of those projects and concepts. So, um, yeah.

[00:03:23.644] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.

[00:03:28.786] Neil Carty: Wow, that's a lot of chapters in that background. But yeah, I started as a filmmaker at a film production company back in the early 2000s. I then worked heavily in branded entertainment and across emerging technology at some of the large holding companies as well as strategic advisories. And then I've worked with immersive creators throughout my whole career. In many cases, while they were on the fringes or really building new properties. And it's been an incredible experience to... I'll have the resources and the distribution network to actually realize a lot of those dreams to reach those pieces to a mass audience. So that's where I come from.

[00:04:04.524] Kent Bye: And how did the VR piece come in, or the immersive part for you?

[00:04:08.621] Neil Carty: Well, I mean, look, I've always been passionate about VR and immersive art and art in general. Like the first day I put a headset on, it was a whole new world for me in the new storytelling tactics. When we think about what we're building at Cosm, we talk a lot about shared reality and that it's a deeper emotional connection of people connecting with the content but also one another. While we love VR and we love Full Dome, we love everything, it's about that shared experience regardless of where you are to dive into the story.

[00:04:38.004] Katy Yudin: I've been working in the immersive space for about the last 15 years, I think before it was even called immersive. Really starting out on the digital interactive production, like producing interactive documentaries. My first foray into this world was actually discovering it for DocLot back in 2009. So it opened up a whole new world of kind of storytelling capabilities. So I was on the production side and then I worked on the curation side of a festival for many years, curating documentaries. you know, both projects and creators and performers and workshops exploring all forms of analog and digital storytelling, which has now brought me to Cosm. So it's a really beautiful journey kind of building on top of one another.

[00:05:16.390] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd love to hear a bit more context for Cosm and how Cosm came about.

[00:05:22.617] Neil Carty: Sure. So, I mean, Cosm is built on some incredibly pioneering technologies. Back in 2020, we acquired Evans & Sutherland and Spitz, two massive players. Evans & Sutherland on the software and technology side of full dome theaters, and on Spitz, they've built some of the largest full dome theaters. theme park and attraction rides in any curved screen in the world. That along with the acquisition of LiveLikeVR, so a dominant player in live streaming of sports and entertainment into headset, and C360, which is the immersive capture components, we've built a truly end-to-end stack of delivering immersive experiences. So it's been a fast ride the past three and a half years, but when you look at the 75 years of history we have, building some of the biggest spaces in the world, we've been doing this for a long time, just in a new form and iteration.

[00:06:10.751] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd love to hear some elaboration on some of that IP, because that goes way back to the very beginnings of virtual reality with Ivan Sutherland and the Sword of Damocles, and then Evans and Sutherland, real pioneers of 3D graphics.

[00:06:23.618] Neil Carty: Yeah, I mean, I think if you take a look at, you know, Sketchpad was one of the first graphical interfaces. I mean, those are two legends in the field, you know, in Evans & Sutherland. The Sword of Domocles back in 1968 was the first head-on display. I mean, these are all things that happened on the University of Utah campus at our offices. And then to look back at that pioneering technology and see how far it's come. and how now we can bring that into sort of a new era to reinvent the way that people experience content. It's really exciting. And just to see how all those different areas of immersive technologies that back then were fairly nascent now can be brought out to the masses. It's a massive opportunity. We're just most excited about the fact that everyone can experience this together.

[00:07:04.479] Kent Bye: I'd love to hear any of your reflections on that legacy that you're carrying forth.

[00:07:08.396] Katy Yudin: Yeah, I think the other thing to add here is, you know, together with the companies that comprise Cosm today, you know, we've been producing full dome films for the planetarium industry for years and years. So just in terms of thinking about the things that we're going to be creating next, again, there is, you know, a deep history there. And if you've been to a planetarium, you've probably seen one of our films, whether that's Birth of Planet Earth or... you know, Dynamite Earth or whatever the astronomy and space films are, they've been out there, we've been creating them for years, as well as distributing films from the greater full dome community. So we're really just taking all of that now and up-leveling it with the technology capabilities of LED domes.

[00:07:47.145] Neil Carty: There's a real interesting point in that. I think, you know, my immersive experience was in a planetarium back in 1987 at Space Camp. You know, when you think about, I mean, we have over 750 active installs through our partner planetariums around the world. That's a footfall of 25 million people, right, that are experiencing spherical content, probably one of the most underutilized distribution networks in the world. You marry that with the venues, with the VR, with everything that's out there, it creates a really robust ecosystem to deliver upon. And when we think about shared reality, it's not only what's happening live somewhere in the case of an NBA game or a UFC match, but also how that experience can get democratized where every single person in the house gets a front row seat or at the sidelines, particularly in the venues. And then as Katie had mentioned, using the LED technology, the resolution is beyond impressive where you will feel like you're physically there. That's what's really exciting.

[00:08:42.000] Kent Bye: So yeah, take me back to 2020 when Cosm acquired all these different IPs. Had Cosm existed in any capacity before the acquisition of all this IP? Or is this something that saw that there's an opportunity to buy all this and create this new company from scratch?

[00:08:57.520] Neil Carty: I mean, it comes down to the visionary leadership of our chairman at Mirasol Capital and Steve Wynn and Jeb Terry, our CEO, and that they had a very clear vision for what we can build. And those acquisitions, they were all pieces in the puzzle, right? So the name didn't exist before we built the name. And then we went out there with this very focused approach to make sure that we're building that end-to-end stack. And each one of those companies contributes in a very unique perspective. You know, it's all part of this larger vision. And then the biggest piece of that is the announcement of CosmVenues, which are launching in Los Angeles and Dallas. And we can get into more of that, but that in combination with the entire Fulldome network that's out there creates this really incredible opportunity to distribute content in such a large scale.

[00:09:41.465] Kent Bye: Well, I know there's been different full dome film festivals for folks who are more independent creators making stuff. There's Kasper Sonnen who started to curate different dome experiences at IFA Doc Lab, I believe in 2019, where he started to show some more creative pieces in a dome context. There's also the SAT in Montreal that has a really sophisticated dome that I had a chance to experience when I was at the Symposium IX that had A lot of spatial surround sound. What they said was one of the most advanced domes at the time. But I don't know if you're planning on surpassing that with some of the technology you're doing. But I'd love to hear about the existing ecosystem of these independent creators that are creating stuff, I think, all the way back 14 when i first started the podcast i talked to folks who are you know creating custom software to project these different spatial contexts into dome experiences so this is something where there's been this independent creator community but it hasn't necessarily taken on with a lot of the planetarium curators let's say to program some of this stuff beyond just the astronomy context so yeah i'd love to hear your assessment of what's been happening in this ecosystem because it's not coming out of nowhere there's been existing creators that have been starting to do it but In terms of the broader awareness of the community of programmers, it seems like this is a new opportunity to push what's possible with the dome medium.

[00:10:56.010] Katy Yudin: I think this is an opportunity we're really excited about for creators. And you're right, a few have sort of started entering the space, but it's been relatively unknown. We love to think about our planetarium network and planetariums in general as these OG immersive spaces. And the fact that we now have the power of all of these other companies as part of Cosm, we're kind of able to open up that opportunity to creators to find a path for their existing pieces, like VR, for example, to be able to distribute it into planetariums, whether that's planetariums that take it in for screenings or festivals that program it in planetariums. We're very excited to see IDFA DocLab have a kind of a planetarium full dome track, and we would love to see more festivals think about full dome work as immersive storytelling. It belongs here as well. you know, amongst the VR and AR interactive storytelling. So I think this is something that we're super passionate about. And when we work with creators, whether that's on the distribution side or on commissioning new pieces, we definitely think about the distribution to planetariums. So things are created for Cosm venues first, but then they can be distributed to planetariums and they can be distributed to VR. So in essence, planetariums just, you know, they complete the circle here and just provide a space for all this incredible artwork.

[00:12:10.924] Neil Carty: What I'd say is the creative community is at the center of everything that we do, particularly at Cosm Studios and Labs. We built this part of the organization at the inception of the company. It was very thoughtful in that we want to make sure there's an incredible legacy of people that are working in Fulldome, in AR, VR, MR. We want to make sure that we're bringing those people in, bringing that outside-in thinking, not only because we want to create incredible content experiences for people to enjoy, but because we want to give them the canvas, our technology, for them to understand what they're creating for. And in many cases, there's actually an opportunity for them to impact the development of that technology so it's an ever-evolving canvas. So we're out here at Tribeca, at Sundance, at South By to really make sure that we're giving access to that. And Katie and the team work very closely with those folks from, I mean, everything starts with a conversation, but usually that's two to three months of development time to get into what a potential pitch would look like. Happy to say it out here, too. We also compensate people for their time. It's very important to make sure that people are getting paid for the time that they're putting into it. And our goal is, look, to work with them. So in an ideal world, we're greenlighting everything that we bring to the process. It may not happen immediately, but beyond. And that's what's really exciting. One of the most exciting things when we talk about the Full Dome Network, a lot of people that are working in traditional VR type maybe that's an oxymoron traditional VR, but they've actually never seen the look on someone's face when they experience their content, because it's always behind a mask or behind a headset, whereas we bring them inside of a shared space, the headset's off, they actually can see the emotion of people that are going through that narrative, And it's a pretty moving experience. In fact, I love to like record people after they get out of it just to get their impressions and they can barely string a sentence together. And that is the validation that Katie and I work towards every single day to just blow people's minds and then allow them to reinvent the way they tell those stories using our canvas.

[00:13:58.746] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd love to hear a bit more context for some of the specific places that you're building as part of Cosm with some of the locations that you're building and how you may be pushing forward the technology for all the different stuff that you're integrating, whether it's spatialized sound or new projecting technology or LEDs or what types of stuff that you're looking at in terms of to push the cutting edge of what's possible with this type of full dome experience.

[00:14:22.287] Neil Carty: So, yeah, our first two consumer-facing venues are one in Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, overlooking SoFi Stadium, arguably one of the most advanced entertainment districts in the world. Really excited about that. The second one is in Grandscape at the Colony outside of Dallas, Texas. So those are first of the two as big, you know, and there'll be many more to come, right, around announcements. But when we think about the technology, the core is, of course, the domed LED technology where there's one component of the experience. Then there's also a hall area for onboarding and offboarding and shared community food and beverage, a deck that overlooks the outside. A little less technology outside, but opportunities to bring in other elements that can bring that story together. And then sound is an incredibly important component to that. But we really think about all the different sensory components to that. Our Experience Center has a 30.4 sound array. It'll be much bigger in the venues. The idea is that these are 1,500 seat capacity venues where people will be able to move around the space and really feel like they're inside that world. But we want to create consistency that allows us to deliver incredible shared reality experiences for cause and venues. Those can also then migrate very easily into the Full Dome network. You know, some content will work better than others. There's also content specifically that we're making just for that full DOM network that are heavily based on science and education and curriculum based. And there'll be a crossover where a lot of that can go in between.

[00:15:47.099] Katy Yudin: I think as Neil kind of alluded to, it all really comes together in one space. And part of it being proprietary and part of the bringing the artists and working with our teams is that ability to kind of shape the technology into what creators need it to be. So we're, you know, we definitely have our eyes open and ears listening to what is it that creators need, how can we bring them closer in. And so when we think about what are the resources that we need to provide beyond financial, beyond like team support, it's really getting to play with the technology. Every time I come to the Experience Center in Salt Lake City, I see new demos. And the demos are always trying to push forward what's possible. So I don't know what there'll be next week.

[00:16:28.101] Neil Carty: That's the exciting part about it. And I think what's fun is there's such a wide breadth of content that we're focusing on at Cosm. There's the live sports and entertainment, which is going to be incredible. Court side of the Knicks, front row of a concert, all that. But then there's also these immersive art, experiential cinema, and other narrative pieces that will create very different emotions amongst people. But the idea is that you'll be transported together in whatever story, sporting event, music event that's out there. Some pretty big announcements recently with the NBA and UFC. We just announced a deal with Cirque du Soleil to bring that content into the venues. And then Nancy Baker Cahill, which is a great example of someone that we see here around the grounds at places like Tribeca that has a really great following and is a really prolific creator in large-scale canvases, shared experiences, that we'll also be bringing in to those experiences. And I think on the topic of immersive art, I think it's very different working with a living artist versus one that has passed. And that, as Katie mentioned, like we give them the canvas. She is building for that with that in mind, as opposed to let's try to reinterpret what an artist may think about their work coming up into a specific space. We're working with them hand in hand to think through that entire experience design, that entire manifestation of her work. Really exciting. We get passionate about that.

[00:17:46.544] Katy Yudin: The last thing I would add to that, you know, there isn't like an SDK kit that we provide creators. They really need to spend time with it and they spend more time and more time in the experiment and they try things out and it's a very collaborative process. And I think, you know, we're not there yet. We haven't finished a production for the LED. But I think the collaborative process, you know, together with our teams, the creators, the teams that they bring on board, you know, creates a really special and open and innovative environment where no one's afraid to try anything. No is never the answer to a question of is this possible? Can we try this? It's that back and forth. It's us really working so, so closely with those creators. And it also just brings up just the role of a studio and the role of a producer in that relationship to really shepherd a project, you know, from conception to distribution, really to ensure the creator vision, to ensure, you know, the marketing is coordinated, the press, elevating the brand of the artist. Like it all really needs to come together as well as the actual experience that they're creating.

[00:18:45.134] Kent Bye: A couple of clarifying questions is, one, I know that in traditional planetariums and domes, you have people in the round. They're all looking up at what's equivalent to a 360 video that you're projecting onto a dome. And I'm wondering if what you're talking about with watching events, if it's people looking forward at a dome that's at a tilt at 30 or 45 degrees that you are able to have essentially everybody looking in the same direction, but more equivalent to, say, a 180 video type of context. So yeah, I'd love to hear.

[00:19:14.244] Neil Carty: There's a lot of different formats across the network. They're not all consistent, right? I think there's certain content that will work better than others. Our venues and our CX displays are actually more in the forward-facing orientation. That's where I personally and where we believe that the industry is going. When you see one of these, this is like there's nothing you can't do with a CX display. And at the same time, though, a lot of the other content, it's a little bit more tilted. It's above. Yeah, so you're not going to necessarily have like a... a theatrical performance, or I don't think there'll ever be Monday Night Football inside of certain planetariums, right? But other immersive art pieces where you do feel lost and it's surrounding you. But we customize every one of these pieces that we do to make sure that it fits across the network. And yeah, there's different horizon lines. Sometimes there's different use of sound and light that we have to weigh in to make sure that it works in the different facilities. I think most importantly, too, there's a lot of VR to full dome or venue translation that requires a lot more thinking, right? Because like inside of a headset, there's a lot of negative space. And that doesn't matter because you have a headset on, you're looking down. But when you're in a full dome theater, like there's people in front of you, the sense of space is different. So those modifications have to be taken into account. And again, it goes back to working with the creator to say, how do we adapt this to make it suitable for all audiences that we're delivering across all cosmic touchpoints?

[00:20:31.459] Katy Yudin: I think a good example of that was our work with an incredible studio, Baobab Studios, about a year and a half ago. We took their 12-minute animation piece, Namu, which existed in VR, and we took it out and brought it into Fulldome. But it wasn't just taking it and importing it. It was, again, a close collaboration of adapting it. How do we take this work and create this director's cut of the experience, like a 180 front-facing version of it? And that required a ton of work on their side because the piece was created in Quill, there were banding issues, and there was a lot of that back and forth with our teams coming to the Experience Center, testing, iterating, testing, until we were able to come to a piece that looks beautiful on both the LED display as well as in planetariums. And so now that piece exists in VR, it exists on HBO Max on TV, and it exists for planetariums.

[00:21:20.689] Kent Bye: And it sounds like that rather than taking a projection and projecting photons onto the dome, it's actually LED panels. And so I'm curious, what's the resolution? Or what are we talking about in terms of how many pixels are there?

[00:21:33.516] Neil Carty: Yeah, it's night and day, right? Can't release all the details of the venue stuff, but our experience in Salt Lake City is an 8K resolution dome with 30 million pixels. It's going to probably be two or three times the size of that in Los Angeles. Each one of those panels that are perforated, so you can imagine the spatial audio array that goes through, the idea of scent and sound and really creating an incredible experience inside of that. It's 100 times brighter than any other screen that you've ever seen in the world. So what Katie was talking about with Baobab, the color grading comes up very differently. So you have to think about where it washes out. But that's the true benefit of LED in that we love projection domes. It's an incredible opportunity. I mean, a lot of our customers utilize them. The brightness of LEDs, the vividness of the blacks are incredible. And it creates a whole new spectrum and a new palette for creators to think about that they hadn't done before. In the instance of Baobab, they had to come in and add some additional illustration because imperfections get shown pretty quickly when you're at that scale.

[00:22:34.019] Katy Yudin: A cause of black is an interesting point. You asked us about the technology and where it's going. Well, a certain aspect, like a cause of black, you open that up to creators, and their minds just start to go wild, like what you could do with that, literally starting with a white dot on the screen and how that can lead to an experience. So I think some of the features of the technology just act as jumping off inspiration points for actually creating original work.

[00:22:57.486] Neil Carty: Like, turn it on, turn it on, or no, it's on. You're in pitch black, right? And it just sort of blows their mind, you know?

[00:23:04.648] Kent Bye: So, yeah, you talked about how the locations in Los Angeles and Dallas were maybe around a capacity of 1,500 people, and it's going to be a lot larger than 8K resolution, you said. But what's the capacity of your demo station that's in Utah, just to get a sense of, like, for 8K resolution, like how many people can sit in a dome of that?

[00:23:22.934] Neil Carty: Our experience center in Salt Lake can probably comfortably fit 300 or 400 people. And we use that. It's not open to the public, but we use it for R&D, for private events. A good example is when we announced our NBA partnership, it was All-Star Week in Salt Lake City. So we did the Spades game over there. There's an opportunity to sort of let people experience this technology. It reminds me of the early days of a headset, where you start explaining what it feels like, and, oh, let me just get a headset on you. It's the same thing, just come into, it's just a Cosm, right? Feel that visceral response of what it's like inside. And that's where we utilize that, of course, around places like Sundance. and other things, but the other interesting piece is when we bring creators out there to test, we purposely do that with a lot of people at the same time. So different groups working on different things, so a lot of that collaboration happens where someone that may be a spatial audio engineer is working with an incredible visual artist. There may be collaborations that come out of those visits alone that we can then get behind and foster as well. But usually, I mean, in the best way possible, someone will come out and think that they want to create something on the dome. It changes 180 degrees in the best possible way because they see the technologies and the capabilities. It actually allows them to reimagine how their story can be told that they hadn't thought of that they could do before.

[00:24:43.573] Kent Bye: I'd love to hear a little bit more about the audio spatial audio array as well as the authoring because I just had a talk with Michael from Singer Studios and he was talking about the Dolby Atmos and like the 7.1.4 arrangement where there's seven speakers at ear level, one subwoofer, and four speakers at a higher level. If you're talking about 30 different speakers, then is this something that someone could author something in Dolby Atmos and then export it to this array? Or is this something that you have to develop your own tools to be able to create this specialized audio with either ambisonic audio or other ways of creating the specialization? Or if you can render it out to a game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine, with a spatialized context, and then just have a way to render it out to the speaker system. So I'm curious how our creator is going to be able to either author the spatial sound, or if this is something they have to actually come out on site to hear it, or if there's other virtualizations for folks to be able to hear what the spatial sound might sound like in a virtual context.

[00:25:43.772] Neil Carty: So I'll caveat this a bit. I'm not a sound expert. But what I'll say is that we think about everything in terms of open source. And we want to be able to work across a wide group of creators. There's no replacement for being on site to hear that. But we work very closely with Unreal and Unity. So everything that people are building in those platforms can and does work very well in this system. And then, yeah, we hope that there will be some incredible sound folks that come out here and tell us here's another way that we can push the boundaries on that. But, you know, our system is custom built from the ground up, but it shouldn't limit us to how we're working with things such as Atmos.

[00:26:20.939] Katy Yudin: I mean, we have an incredible audio team at Cosm who kind of step in to work very, very closely with the creators and helping them bring those experiences to life. We know that for the projects that are currently in production for the forthcoming venues, they will be mixing sound on site. These sites do not exist yet, so you cannot actually properly distribute the sound for them in advance. You know, it's this kind of toroidal shape where it covers your peripheral vision and that cap on top with the LEDs. So sound will need to be mixed to that space and we'll have, you know, creators and all of the content really that's going to be playing in Cosm venues will have that sound on site.

[00:26:57.125] Kent Bye: And since we're talking about a forward-facing dome, a lot of folks within the VR industry will talk about things like field of view, where a lot of VR headsets will be around 90 to 100 degrees field of view. And you have something maybe up to 270 degrees is maybe up to the extent of our periphery, where we can't see that 90-degree block behind us. So you have a wide range from 270 to 90. I'm curious if you have an assessment if it's going to be at around 180 degree field of view or larger than 180 or less than that. I'm curious if you've thought about what the field of view is so that people can maybe take what they know from the VR experiences of field of view and how this may translate into what the field of view might be in a dome experience like this.

[00:27:40.334] Katy Yudin: I would say it's closer to a 180. You're really forward facing. There's never a need to turn your neck. There's only a need to turn your head up because there might be things literally falling at you from the digital LED sky. So it does make you think about how do you purposely design content to live across this massive canvas, a canvas that does stretch from side to side and from top to bottom. And that definitely opens up opportunities. So we'll see. It's an entirely new shape that's being created for venues. And the only place it currently exists is in our LA office where we've built a miniature version of it. So yeah.

[00:28:14.736] Neil Carty: And one other point too, like on the VR, it's a dome translation, right? That just requires the best cut of a director, how you would want to be guided through the experience. You shouldn't have to crank your neck. You know, it's one focal point where the audience will be following, but you want those people to go through that journey together in the way that that creator had intended. And that's where this opportunity exists, and not only particularly for the planetariums, like there's a whole catalog of content out there, right, that has had, you know, let's call it limited run inside a headset. It creates the opportunity to distribute that much more widely. But then how do you take those learnings on top of it to think about when they're creating the next VR piece, knowing that there's a much bigger, vast network out there that should be creating for that has a different cut? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:58.942] Kent Bye: So I'd love to hear any thoughts you may have on some of the other competitors in the space, in terms of Madison Square Gardens, I've heard, is building a sphere that is going to be, I heard, around 18,000 people, which is maybe around 10 times the size of some of your capacity for 1,500 people. But yeah, I'd love to hear any thoughts on the viability of these larger, much bigger platforms based in Las Vegas, and if that's just a sign of a larger ecosystem that's growing, and any thoughts on their approach for what they're doing with the Madison Square Garden sphere.

[00:29:29.215] Katy Yudin: I think we're really excited by the fact that LEDs are coming to this world and they're really, really exciting. And their ability to deliver an entirely new kind of content experience is kind of magical. So we love to see what Sphere is doing. We think, you know, it's not really a direct competitor. We're doing different things at different scales. So, you know, they're going to be bringing you too. I don't think we're bringing you too yet. We're working on, you know, more on like there's a division between sports and some of the entertainment, science, education, music and art pieces that Neil was kind of talking about, but probably on some smaller properties. So I think in general, we're excited that things like this are coming to audiences. And so there's going to be just a greater demand for these kinds of experiences.

[00:30:13.286] Neil Carty: Look, I think rising tides lift all. I'm a big fan of what Sphere is doing. I'll be first in line when they open. But it's a very different content experience. And as you pointed out, 17,500 people, right? That's going to be big ticket shows and performances where... We have the opportunity at Cosm with a smaller form factor to provide a much more diverse mix of programming that includes live sports and entertainment, immersive art. We can take some really interesting and exciting risks and not worry about not selling out 17,000 people, right? I mean, I'm confident that everything we're doing is going to sell out, but that allows us to work really closely with the creators that may not have had a shot at something bigger. But again, like I'm going to be there first. I can't wait to see it. It's going to be amazing. And we love all the immersive LBE experiences that are popping up because it just means there's a bigger marketplace for that content for everyone out there.

[00:31:06.161] Kent Bye: We're here at Tribeca Immersive 2023, and Staya from the Smartphone Orchestra had a piece here called Emoji, which was all about these emergent group dynamics that were happening with the cell phone. And so I'm curious if you thought about what are some ways to maybe engage the audience in group participation, social dynamics, interactivity at a large scale. I think any time you have trying to draw agency from 1,500 people, it ends up being almost like a random thing act that you can't really find a trace of your agency you know at big sports events you have focusing on one individual on the big screen and they have an ability to like express themselves in some way so yeah i don't know if you've thought about what are ways to really engage the audience in a way that they feel like they can either see a trace of their agency in one of these piece or to play with some of these emergent social dynamics that may have not been possible in previous immersive media because you have you know 1500 people in the same room in this shared experience

[00:32:02.543] Katy Yudin: Yeah, I loved Saya's emoji experience and loved it probably because it was this beautiful shared experience and we really are about shared experiences. So to answer your question, yes, we absolutely think about this. Whether we're developing our own IP from within Cosm or working with creators, These are the things that we kind of task creators to think about. You know, it's not just about the experience in the dome. The experience starts from, you know, when you buy the ticket to when you walk through the door. So there are opportunities for interactivity and onboarding before you even enter the dome in the hall space in these venues. Then there will be opportunities inside the dome. So these are things that we're playtesting and experimenting with constantly through different capsules that happen between experiences as well as in individual experiences. So again, this is where creators are working closely with our interactive teams to develop those modes and then there are opportunities for that on the off-boarding as well and in exploring the venue because a certain part of the experience might live on the roof deck and you kind of need to go explore it so we really think about also in terms of audiences coming to venues they're not just coming in to see the piece and walk out there are going to be things for them to engage with with the content you know before during and after

[00:33:13.256] Neil Carty: Yeah, I think, look, there's a lot of different content genres, all of which will have very different points of group interaction. We think about the big shared reality moments, like whether it be at a live sporting event of how can a fan engage with their favorite team or even can they... give that other competitive team a hard time while they're in there. So there's moments that, as a group, they can participate and have agency in the action. And there'll be opportunities throughout the venue where there'll be more of a one-to-one component where they can dive deeper in. And the idea is, of course, look, if we're doing our job correctly, all those interactions create a unique experience depending upon the actions that you take and the people that you're with that will drive them back again and again for a different and new experience. Some of those moments will be signature. Other ones will be more unique and driven by creators. But that's exactly what we want to...

[00:33:58.158] Kent Bye: Expand that toolkit to them and if they say that there's something that they want to be able to make happen Then we should be able to put some resources behind it to enable that or do our best way to make that happen Yeah, we were just at the onyx studios exhibition and they had a piece there called shadow time which is actually going deep into the history of the birth of computer graphics and some references to the sort of Damocles and actually potentially even some of the offices that you're in now and

[00:34:22.964] Neil Carty: about that we're like how do we get that in the dome it's very you know we need to get the creator over to evans and sutherland she already knows she has an open invitation we were in la and i saw like a picture of the sword of damocles in like one of the dreamscape things i'm like oh they're like the thing starts popping up more and more which is great to see that legacy and that history behind it but yeah

[00:34:43.618] Katy Yudin: We're still in the same office, so come on through. It's still, you know, the dome is in the wing of the building that is entirely new and very innovative and next generation, but once you pass those double doors, the office is still in the 50s.

[00:34:56.748] Kent Bye: So you're in the same office building as where the Sword of Damocles was built, so that's really quite cool.

[00:35:02.372] Katy Yudin: Yep, yeah, it's really special, yeah.

[00:35:05.474] Kent Bye: So yeah, I'm curious, what's next for you with Cosm? Is it Cosm or Cosm Studios?

[00:35:11.015] Katy Yudin: We're Cosm Studios, so we're part of the Cosm Media team at Cosm. So Cosm Media comprises all of the different live production that we do. So there's Cosm Media, there's Cosm Immersive, which is responsible for live production. There's C360. What's next for us? So we're going to be announcing more creator projects that we've commissioned, projects that have gone through the Cosm X Labs R&D development process. So we're super, super excited about some of these announcements. As Neil mentioned, the first artist that we announced was Nancy Baker Cahill, who we couldn't be more thrilled about. And we have these two other ones coming. All the projects are already in production. So that is super exciting. We're very heavily involved in these productions, as I mentioned before. And there's a continuous pipeline of new projects in development with creators. So, you know, we've kind of gone through planning for Slate 1 and we're already working on Slate 2 programming. So that's really thinking about the second six months of programming after venues opens, which is super, super exciting.

[00:36:11.138] Neil Carty: I mean, we've made significant financial and resource commitment towards this slate. And it's important to us that that's a rolling review process. We don't want to leave anything on the table that may come out of the woodwork or a place like Tribeca. But forward thinking, I can't wait for these venues to open their doors for us to see all this content, to introduce the world to shared reality. And there's going to be a... a huge swath of really interesting partnerships and studio productions that we're excited. They're going to cover a wide spectrum of interest areas.

[00:36:43.312] Katy Yudin: The only thing I would just add to that is, you know, while there's all this amazing, exciting production work happening for venues, you know, the planetariums and our customers there are always going to be top of mind. And so we're making content investments there as well. We were talking earlier about, you know, some taking some existing work. We like to call those distressed assets. I believe, Neil, that's your term. and thinking about what are existing pieces that we can still bring to the full dome network, pieces that have already been created by artists that we can work to adapt. So we recently introduced a content subscription model for planetariums because, you know, there's also these changing behaviors of planetariums. How do we get them to also take in a larger amount of content and a greater diversity of content? So how do we go beyond those astronomy films? How do we get immersive art pieces and narrative works and kids and family content in there? from existing creators, pieces that are already out there. So we're kind of parallel pathing with production for venues, but also adaptations, acquisitions for the Full Dome Network.

[00:37:39.520] Neil Carty: And just to add to that, I mean, it's really important that we listen to our customers. So throughout that whole process, whether we're developing or greenlighting or acquiring content, we make sure that this is the type of stuff that these planetariums want, that we're meeting demand. And if there's something out there that they want that hasn't been developed, we're going to go out there and do it for them. So, yeah, we think about that create once, distribute many approach. And there's a lot of overlaps where things that will play in venues will work in planetariums. Things that are in planetariums can work in venues and vice versa. And then layered on top of that, the opportunity for the one-to-one engagement around content in VR is also a tremendous opportunity. We have an incredible team on the ground that captures a lot of live sports and entertainment that already gets streamed out to major headsets. The incredible thing about that is that's going to also go to venues and beyond.

[00:38:27.526] Kent Bye: I had a chance to talk to Danielle Giroux from Astraea. You know, this is a publishing arm that's born under Atlas V and trying to go back to the backlog of all these amazing immersive storytelling pieces that have been premiering at all these festivals over the number of years. I talked to her just about her process of trying to get into these different distribution platforms, whether it's the Quest Store, PSVR, you have the Steam and itch.io and Viveport, they have all these different opportunities to go both from standalone, from PC VR, and then a lot of it is to optimize it into mobile, but if it's being shown in a format like Cosm Studios, it's maybe PC VR and maybe less impetus to try to optimize it for performance, but more for optimize it to be able to be shown on the screen format. I'm curious to hear any thoughts or reflections on whether or not you plan on collaborating closely with publishing arms like Astraea, Diversion Cinema, Lucid Realities, and others that are emerging. Or if you're trying to go it alone and work directly with the creators to be able to do that type of translation and distribution. So yeah, I'd love to hear any thoughts on that.

[00:39:31.661] Katy Yudin: I mean, we're doing both. We're absolutely working with those publishing houses. Like we said earlier, they've been there from the beginning. Some of these started out as immersive creators and then formed companies. So we're working with both the publishing studios, with individual creators. Our mission is to get that content out there, to get the work seen. And so we're really excited by those opportunities. This is a small community. And I think, as Neil said, rising tides lift everyone. We're not competing for content. We're not competing for those things. So we're really excited by the projects that they have in their catalog and finding the right match for planetariums that would love to be able to take them in.

[00:40:07.714] Neil Carty: I mean, look, there's room for everyone. And there's our in-house productions, there's work with the creators, and there's working with studios. It's just going to come down which one adapts very well to a full dome format, and also what subject matter will align with the interests of those audiences. But our goal for particularly for Planetariums is to deliver content that will continue to engage their students and their audiences, but also expand their operating hours and allow them to compete with all the other incredible immersive experiences that are out there to bring it inside. So, yeah, we're working with everyone. You know, that's the goal.

[00:40:44.801] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of immersive media and immersive storytelling and all the different forms of immersive entertainment and what it might be able to enable?

[00:40:58.330] Katy Yudin: It's just delivering incredible shared experiences. As humans, we want to experience content together. It's why we go to the cinema, so we can look at one another, so we can see tears and hear a wild chuckle. So I think it is about being together and experiencing incredible things together.

[00:41:15.871] Neil Carty: I mean, it's an emotionally transportive machine, right? Whether it be in a game or a really sweet story, I think the ability to actually feel like you're there and to experience it where you may not be able to experience it elsewhere is the most powerful thing immersive entertainment can do.

[00:41:34.555] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[00:41:39.448] Katy Yudin: We're always open for ideas. Great ideas come from everywhere. So if you have a great idea, if you have a project, if you want to talk, come to us. There's an open door policy.

[00:41:51.091] Neil Carty: Right back at you. We're open for business and we love, I mean, it means so much to us that people are willing to share their ideas. They trust us with those stories and we hope we can bring them to large audiences. So yeah, hit us up if you want to talk and come out and visit us in Salt Lake City to see this for real.

[00:42:08.863] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, I think we're all still waiting to hear what's going to happen with Sundance New Frontier this next year. But usually, it's in Park City, which you have to fly through Salt Lake City. So for everyone who's coming to Sundance, I imagine this would be a good opportunity to drop by and check out some demos and connect with the team. So yeah, Katie and Neil, thanks for taking the time to help give a little bit more of a back story for what you have going on with the future of these Dome experiences at Cosm and Cosm Studios. And yeah, looking forward to laying my eyes on these experiences and seeing what this medium and format and distribution platform is going to do for the larger immersive industry. So thanks for taking the time to help share your story.

[00:42:44.769] Neil Carty: Thank you. Thank you very much.

[00:42:47.270] Kent Bye: So that was Neil Carty. He's the head of Cosm Studios and Labs and also Katie Uden, who's the senior director of studio development of the Cosm Studios team. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, I had a chance to catch up with them last year at Tribeca. This was the first time that I really got any detailed information for what Cosm was, what they're up to. So it sounds like that in 2020, they acquired a number of different key players that have been in the immersive industry for well over 75 years. They acquired Evans & Sutherland and Spitz Incorporated, LiveLikeVR, and then they've been developing the C360, which is like more of the cameras. And so they have Cosm Immersive, which is more of the global live events and content production and distribution for the leagues, broadcasters, and teams. And I talked at the beginning how they're collaborating with Amazon. NBC Sports, TNT Sports, NBA, the UFC. They're actually having UFC 303 that they're doing their private opening party event that's happening on Saturday, June 29th, 2024, which happens to be tomorrow. So both Neil and Katie have been going to these immersive festivals and talking to Immersive creators, because a lot of the immersive art, immersive stories is a good candidate to see if it would make a good translation into something that is a little bit more like a half of a screen. So like a 180 video that is more front facing. So not all of the 360 videos would necessarily make an intuitive translation to a 180 field. And I think that actually the Apple immersive video is also really leaning into this 180 aesthetic for, you know, you're just front facing and really pushing forward what you can do with the high quality that you get on the Apple immersive video, but also this large venues for what Cosm calls the quote unquote shared reality, which is essentially like these immersive experiences that you see with a bunch of people. so having like live events and live concerts and live entertainment but also another platform for immersive artists and immersive storytellers to have a venue to tell their stories within this context the sphere is great in order to have this really massively huge 17 000 18 000 capacity for folks to watch things like a youtube concert or fish concert or grateful dead concert But they have to sell out that many tickets in order to make it make sense, which means they have a little bit less freedom to be more experimental. So really great to see that with a smaller capacity than something like Cosm can see, like what kind of content really works with these shared reality, these shared experiences of bringing people out. to watch some of this content. So, you know, having these content partners with like Live Like VR was a lot of the live sports that they acquired and the different licensing agreements to be able to share some of this content. So you can imagine if there's a big sporting event or a big music event, you can go watch it with a bunch of people and get that sort of feeling that you would at the actual event, but having the advantage of having like a super high resolution vision of what's happening. Just to note that the UFC is actually going to be holding an event at the Madison Square Garden Sphere on September 14th, 2024. That's on Mexican Independence Day on September 16th, but they're doing a whole live event that's happening within the context of the sphere. So I imagine some of what the Cosm is going to be doing with some of their cameras is going to see like, how do you translate this kind of live sporting event into a big group experience? A lot of these live events end up selling out. And so this may be additional opportunities for people to not only have this live event, but have it on a big giant screen where you can sometimes actually have a better experience with seeing what the cameras can see with things that are included or whatnot. So what would it be like to actually have this kind of blend between having the liveness of the live actually being in an event with a big group of people watching the same thing at the same time? and to have that type of excitement, but also to have the high resolution. What they say is like 8K plus. I've seen on Cirque du Soleil, in the description there, they say it's like a 12K plus. They're a little bit unclear as to what the exact resolution is. The Sphere is saying that on Wikipedia that it's around like 16K, so it's gonna be smaller than that. But still, it's an opportunity for a lot of immersive artists to see if their content may work in the context of these venues. So this conversation that I did was over a year ago now. And so I just wanted to read one of their latest posts from LinkedIn from a couple of months ago, where they say, That's in Inglewood, Los Angeles, overlooking SoFi Stadium. So transforming live sports and entertainment, Cosm LA invites you to experience the biggest and best live sports from ESPN, the National Basketball Association, Ultimate Fighting Championship, TNC Sports US, and NBC Sports and Immersive 8K+. In addition to live sports, Cosm LA will showcase music, entertainment, such as Cirque du Soleil Group, and immersive art experiences from our Cosm Studios creators, Nancy Baker Cahill, Chris Holmes, Ricardo Romanero, and Guy Reed of Planetary Collective. Opening night will feature a live immersive production of Ultimate Fightin' Championship 303 in hashtag shared reality. Presented in our mind-blowing 87-foot diameter 8K plus LED dome, get closer to the most sought-after events taking place around and share the excitement with hundreds of other fans and shared reality. So that's a little bit more context. Some of the other things that they announced, I guess the 87-foot diameter 8K plus LED dome for what they're calling the CX display technology. They also have other projector technologies that they have, so projected domes. So they have the capacity to not only have content that's showing in this more front-facing 180 dome, but also a network of planetariums that have different horizon lines and different orientations there. And so they have the VR to full dome translation, but also VR to venue translation or VR to the front facing 180 translation. Both Katie and Neil have been at a lot of these different film festivals and curating work and working with immersive artists for the last number of years. I've run into them a number of times. And so last year, Tribeca finally had a chance to sit down with them to get a little bit more context for what's going on there. And they're right on the brink of starting to open up. I think they're having a private event on June 29th, and then they're going to be opening it up in July to start to have some of these other different pieces that are showing there. So you can check out their website to see some of the different shows. And yeah, hopefully they'll be able to find new content genres that really work in this format to work on this size and scale of the market. So yeah, that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list to support a podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.

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