The future is a fickle thing. Some innovations seem like worthwhile endeavors (self-driving cars), while others (hoverboards) fail to inspire. Some ideas—like the Pierre Cardin and Andre Courreges designs that inspired looks worn in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey—simply offer a compellingly chic outline of how things could evolve (in a world where one manic director maintains complete creative control). These days, plenty of promising new technology exists, along with West Coast creative types who are dreaming up ways to adapt hardware and software to futuristic concepts adrift in our collective imagination. One such idea, virtual reality, a method of filming with multiple cameras and stitching together the digital footage into a seamless immersive experience, just sparked a clever new app from the digital team at Santa Monica’s KCRW public radio station.

Making use of the Google Cardboard virtual reality headsets mailed by the New York Times to its print subscribers late last year (or similar models that can be procured from the station), KCRW has just launched its own virtual reality mobile app housing videos with 360-degree views of artists performing live during sessions recorded in the station’s famed basement studio. Death Cab for Cutie became the first band to step in front of the eight donated GoPro cameras—rigged up by KCRW’s team—during a performance of “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive,” from the album Kintsugi. Now the up-close-and-personal footage of Ben Gibbard and his bandmates can be viewed on the app.

Station president Jennifer Ferro says the band already had some experience with virtual reality before they arrived in Santa Monica. “They’d already done an experiment like this with one of the pioneers we’d been working with,” she says, noting that although Death Cab signed on for the initial test recording session, virtual reality filmmaking is still in its infancy. “Even though we’ve been talking a lot about virtual reality, many bands don’t know what we’re talking about, it really hasn’t penetrated people’s full consciousness yet,” Ferro says. She explains that the weekly live studio performances rarely include visitors or guests. “There’s no room and it’s difficult to see,” she says. But the virtual reality cameras capture all the action for any viewer with a mobile phone and virtual reality headset. “We’ve had artists in here that have bands that may have 10 people and they barely fit in the studio, and that’s when virtual reality will be really great. Before, it was almost impossible to see some of them,” she notes. For now, more films are in the works, and Ferro has a mental list of bands she’d like to see perform in a virtual reality headset. “How killer would Radiohead be?” she asks.

By Elizabeth Varnell

 

Pictured: Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie being filmed for a stereoscopic 3D virtual reality video inside the studio at KCRW in Santa Monica.
Photo courtesy of KCRW

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