Imagine 28 hours of your favourite TV shows with no ads or promos, then dice into bite-sized chunks and put it into a swirling stream of 22,000 video clips and images. What you get is the world's first 360 degree 3D cinema, debuting now at the University of New South Wales.
As part of the Sydney Festival, the university's iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research is showcasing its "T-Visionarium", a virtual reality theatre that is 10metres wide and 4metres high.
Wearing 3D glasses, a Cinema goer steps into the cylindrical cinema, selects the video clips they want to watch using a computer program, and produce and direct where they want the story to go.
From the 30-metre-curved screen, the viewers experience being surrounded by hundreds of Australian television broadcast clips moving in three dimensions.
"It feels like you're floating in space," Christian Carter, cinema participant told New Tang Dynasty Television (NTD TV). "You just look in any direction and you can see what you want to see and see it how you want to see it."
Another participant Brian Bagshaw said: "It moves the viewer from being a passive receptor of an experience to being an active participant and, therefore, it can make us the author, as well as the viewer, as well as the actor in this particular experience, so there is a fundamental shift in the way we view entertainment."
The cinema technology is not only for entertainment.
iCinema Chairman Dennis Del Fabero says it can also be used as a virtual reality training tool for workers in various fields. It is already finding application in industry with four mining companies having purchased the technology.
"Miners can go into a system like T-Visionarium and then look at things like maintenance, how to work machinery underground, what happens when the ceiling collapses and the sort of things they need to be aware of when they're underground," said Mr Del Fabero.
It might also help serve as a counselling tool.
"Because T-Visionarium is an adaptable system," he said. "It can be used not only to train people, but also to help people to counsel people to deal with traumas or to deal with various anxieties."
The iCinema Centre states on the university website that its research programme focuses on research into digital interactivity for benchmark applications across the arts, culture and industry. In particular it is focused on the way digital can be used to imagine new ways of living in the contemporary world, redefining how we seek recreation and learning, and the way we work and do business.
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