Designing The Big Bait Ball For Ocean Odyssey

National Geographic Encounter: Ocean Odyssey is a one-of-a-kind immersive experience featuring video mapping, 8K photorealistic animation, custom projection screens, immersive spatial soundscapes, interactive realtime audience tracking, and a giant dome experience. SPE Partners, the creators and producers of National Geographic Encounter, recruited an international team of Academy, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning artists, including design firm Falcon’s Creative Group, visual effects team Pixomondo, technology integrator Kraftwerk Living Technologies, producer and composer David Kahne, and Mirada Studios.

Discover the experience here, and learn more about the photorealistic animation.

The 3D “Bait Ball” scene features over 120,000 fish during a feeding frenzy in the open ocean. “This is one continuous four-minute shot that is 8K resolution at 60 frames per second,” says Lisa Truitt, chief creative officer and a managing partner of SPE Partners. “This amount of data was incredibly challenging to render and load. Every time we needed to make a change to this media, it took an extraordinary amount of time because of how much data was in each frame of this one seamless shot.”

 

Guests stand on an elevated platform in the middle of the venue’s dome, creating extremely short viewing distances and limited positions for projectors. “We needed to reach every spot of the dome without generating any shadows of the people, while keeping the pixels small enough to allow for a photorealistic image despite short viewing distances,” says Thomas Gellermann, head of research and development at Kraftwerk Living Technologies.

For the complex projection display, a 3D scan of the dome was taken to perfectly fit a design between the existing structural columns. Kraftwerk LT custom-designed and produced a fiberglass screen, manufactured in the U.S. and assembled with Bondo work and coated with a custom-mixed high-gain silver paint done onsite. “Since guests are only 10' away from the screen, perforated aluminum wasn’t an option, as the perforation would be visible to the guests,” adds Gellermann. “With the challenges of high-gain silver and the need for a perfectly smooth and precise surface, the painting process could only be done manually, after all panels had been installed.”

To achieve such a small pixel size, 24 high-resolution projectors are positioned behind the guest platform. The projectors are aligned with a camera-based auto-alignment system using nine cameras. Kraftwerk LT runs 24 channels—12 pairs for 3D—via a custom-built, high-performance video server to accommodate the 8K resolution. Each frame is 192 MB in size. With 60 fps left and right eye, one second of content is 22.5 GB of data, which needs to play in perfect sync over 24 channels.

 

Loudspeakers are placed at calculated angles underneath the guest platform, and more transducers are attached to the back of the fiberglass surface of the screen. The bait ball scene uses 25 audio channels, 14 of which are the transducers.

“When you’re creating something that is truly unlike anything that has been done before, there is the challenge of audience expectations,” adds Truitt. “We had to design this experience in a way that made it intuitive for audiences’ reactions and engagement. Yet, we had no ‘experience model’ to follow. We tested at every stage and adapted our plans and design accordingly. We continue to do this even now as we learn every day how audiences are responding to this new kind of entertainment experience.”

“This team was one of the best I’ve ever worked with,” concludes David Schaefer, vice president of Falcon’s Creative Group. “I think with any other team it wouldn’t have been possible. So I am really proud of how everybody came together. Weeks leading up to opening, the transformation onsite was absolutely unbelievable and the feedback has been great.”