Beautiful VR and Film exploring the world’s largest time-based pointcloud dataset

FRAMERATE is a contemplative artwork, a research tool and a spatial documentary prophecy.

Created from thousands of daily 3D scans of the British countryside, the work observes change on a spatial and temporal scale, impossible to see with the human eye or the lens of traditional cameras.

We are in a forest watching the seasons unfold around us; Spring breaks, Summer sun shines dappled through the leaves, they turn amber and fall a second later. In a quaint English vegetable garden a pumpkin grows. Sand ebbs and flows across a Norfolk beach while the cliff incrementally retreats. A once in a lifetime landslide destroys sea defences. 268 cows are milked. 519 pints are drunk.

This is not just an artwork. The data collected and presented by FRAMERATE is groundbreaking scientific research. These pioneering data sets contain empirical, measurable, spatial facts: The amount of erosion a cliff experiences with each tide; the daily growth of each leaf on a sweetcorn plant; the amount of sunlight and rainfall in that 24 hour period; the way a tree moves over a year.

Finally, FRAMERATE is about the future and about how we make spatial records of the earth. ScanLAB believes in a few years time many areas of the planet will be observed at this frequency, and at this level of three dimensional detail as a matter of course. The data will be gathered by the navigational sensors of a billion autonomous vehicles, drones, personal devices and the increasingly three dimensional surveillance system.

In today’s society, where people’s movement is constrained by social isolation, FRAMERATE gives us time to pause and think. It allows us to see subtle, unseen movements on the planet’s timescale. It allows us to see NOW, what we might all see in the future.

Lead organisation

ScanLAB Projects

Hardware

Film + HTC VIVE

Team

Matthew Shaw – Director
William Trossell – Director
Max Celar – XR Artist & Developer
Tom Brooks – Computational Designer
Grey Grieson – Pointcloud Artist
Soma Sato – Capture Specialist
Brad Damms – Capture Specialist
Paul Macro – Capture Specialist