Rover

Abstract

Rover is a mechatronic imaging device inserted into quotidian space, transforming the sights and sounds of the everyday through its peculiar modes of machine perception. Using computational light field photography and machine listening it creates a kind of cinema following the logic of dreams: suspended but mobile, familiar yet infinitely variable in detail. Rover draws on diverse traditions of robotic exploration, landscape and still life depiction, and audio field recording to create a hybrid between photography and cinema. Rover won the Best Art Paper award at SIGGRAPH 2017. For ACM Designing Interactive Systems / Creativity and Cognition 2019, Rover is installed on the 70 megapixel VRoom display in the black box theater in CalIT2 at UC San Diego. We have developed new functionality where image synthesis is distributed across the panels of the tiled display, visual and sonic trajectories are shaped using the unique hardware and software capabilities at UCSD. The result is an ultra-high resolution audio-visual experience with 4 channel surround sound.