Immersive Museums was a collaborative research of researchers at ALiVE and students from CTL, CityU using one of the installation in our lab, iDome.

iDome is a semi-spherical projection system, that you may rotate your point-of-view horizontally to see video in all directions around you. It is not any kind of stereo projection, but it gives you a very realistic experience because the screen is curved and warp around your field-of-view.

In order to shoot a video like that, you need also a special camera, Ladybug 3 from Point Grey. We like to describe it as an off-the-shelf Google Street View equipment, even Google build there own own, since this camera do exactly like it.

Shooting with the camera is pretty intuitive, no focusing (it has a very small aperture which give a large depth-of-field), no light metering (the aperture is not adjustable anyway). The most to concern is to find a place to hide from the camera, so you are not inside the video recording.

In order to do the shooting outdoor without any wall socket, we built a battery system for it, which can lasts for about 4 hours.

We have been to Lin Heung Tea House, Lam Tsuen Temple, Yau Ma Tei Temple street for shooting. You may see some of the screen captures at the official website about the research.