Sphere
Sphere is a world’s first $2.3B immersive immersive destination created by Sphere Entertainment Co., a spinoff from Madison Square Garden Entertainment.
As part of the startup executive leadership team, I initiated and led creation of the design function, immersive design guidelines, real-time tech, creator tools, and benchmark content. Due to confidentiality I am unable to showcase the majority of my work. A small sample is highlighted below. For more information on my work with Sphere, please get in touch.
Role
Senior Director, Experience Strategy & Design, then Real-time R&D, March 2019 - March 2023
Early design & development work under the Obscura umbrella, December 2017 - March 2019
U2 Residency
Goal: Help U2 open Sphere with a residency that exceeds their reputation for innovative live shows.
Challenge: Very short creative exploration and pre-production window, and even less time in the venue for technical production. The U2 team were initially integrated into the Sphere Studios pre-rendered content pipeline, resulting in a dysfunctionally slow creative iteration process.
Action: My team and I jumped in to specify technical architecture and solutions to enable rapid prototyping and remove blockers to integrating their established workflow in both the testing environment and at Sphere.
Result: Successful creative development, technical implementation, and launch of the sold out U2 residency with all concepts supported by our solutions.
Core Responsibilities: Strategy, Technical Architecture & Solutions Specification, Stakeholder Alignment, and Cross-functional Leadership.
Team: Willie Williams – Creative Director, John Gerrard – Artist, Stefaan Smasher Desmedt – Technical Director, Brandon Kraemer – Content Technical Director, Serhan Ardila Ulkumen - Lead Real-time Software Engineer, Michael Clement - Senior Real-time Engineer, Joshua Troub – Systems Technician.
John Gerrard for U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere (Image credit: Stufish Entertainment Architects)
John Gerrard for U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere (Image credit: Stufish Entertainment Architects)
John Gerrard for U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere (Image credit: Stufish Entertainment Architects)
Image credit: Stufish Entertainment Architects
Exosphere Content Production & Templates
Goal: Streamline and simplify the process of making content for the Exosphere. Demonstrate artistic capabilities and efficiency of real-time content, and leverage our real-time pipeline and tools to optimize the content production process for the Exosphere.
Challenge: The Exosphere is scheduled to operate 365 days per year, 18 hours per day. That’s a huge amount of content! How will internal and external creative teams create content effectively and efficiently for an entirely new inverted 360° medium that’s more challenging than it appears?
Action: Building on the mapping techniques work I led previously (see below), our team took on solving this problem as part of the Dynamic Content Suite/Sphere Content Development Kit. We created a real-time content production pipeline, benchmark content, and templates that delivered platform ready content in a matter of minutes, with powerful customizable parameters that allowed users to make creative decisions instantly.
Result: Our pipeline and templates reduced the total creative development and production time from the standard of 6-8 weeks down to 2-14 days.
Core Responsibilities: Vision, Strategy, Planning, Stakeholder Alignment, Design & Cross-functional Leadership, Product Requirements, and Team Coaching.
Team: Arwa Mboya – UX/Product Design Lead, Ron Robinson – Art Director, UI/UX Design & Dev – Sasha Menscikova, Nicole Johnson and Jacob Ugalde. Serhan Ardila Ulkumen – Lead Real-time Engineer, Taylor Shechet – Senior Technical Artist, Chelley Sherman – Senior Real-time Graphics Engineer.
Benchmark content created by the Real-time team, live launch on the Exosphere, 2023. (Artist/Developer Chelley Sherman)
Benchmark content created by the Real-time team, live launch on the Exosphere, 2023. (Artist/Developers Serhan Ardila & Taylor Shechet)
Benchmark content created by the Real-time team. Photo by Matt Ramirez
Benchmark content created by the Real-time team. Photo by Clayton Ham
Exosphere Content Strategy & Design Framework
Goal: Make the Exosphere an icon from day 1, create design guidelines to ensure content is successful, and define how to align programming with monetization efforts.
Challenge: The Exosphere is how Sphere will be introduced to the world. Not only will it broadcast the Sphere brand, but it will also serve as a substantial revenue generator for brand-aligned advertising partners. Those partners come with in-house and agency content creators. Creating a dynamic range of inverted 360° content is surprisingly complex and many internal artists struggled with understanding how to get artwork to appear as they intended.
Action: Defined content segments and distribution framework to support target revenue model, created design guidelines, executed design studies to establish a collection of mapping techniques, and tested them with a small team of internal and agency art directors and motion designers.
Result: Established the content strategy and design guidelines to support the advertising business and ensure all content creators could quickly leverage optimized design techniques.
Core Responsibilities: Vision, Strategy, Planning, Stakeholder Alignment, and Design Leadership.
Team: Will Atwood – Visual Design.
Sphere Quickstart Guide
Goal: Improve the process of onboarding talent responsible for creating content for Sphere’s internal 16k resolution media plane.
Challenge: Early content development tests were repeatedly missing the mark in terms of aligning the virtual content space with the media plane geometry. The result was a suboptimal or unusuable viewing experience. Additionally, the imaging team at the time were utilizing a multi-camera array to achieve the 16k resolution final image. This required a large amount of tedious and error-prone stitching.
Action: Create a technical document illustrating the importance of camera tilt and single-sensor camera efficiency to reduce imaging errors and make the case for an investment in a single-sensor camera solution. Images below are an excerpt, proprietary details such as optimal camera tilt angle are omitted.
Result: Reduced camera tilt errors by 90% and initiated the effort to develop the custom “Big Sky” Camera, capable of achieving Sphere’s 16k resolution with a single-sensor.
Core Responsibilities: Vision, Strategy, Planning, Stakeholder Alignment, and Design Leadership.
Team: Jim Ellis – Technical Director, Visual Designers - Naohiro Haitani & Will Atwood.
Dynamic Content Suite
Goal: Expand and productize Sphere’s creative capabilities to help creators more efficiently achieve their vision for this unprecedented medium.
Challenge: Prior to spearheading this initiative, all content was to be produced with a traditional camera & VFX and/or motion graphics production pipeline. At 16k spherical resolution this meant extremely long production and iteration timelines.
Action: Create a trio of real-time creator tools. Pitch and create prototypes to gain buy-in for the design and development of a real-time content platform, pipeline and product suite.
Result: Our prototypes successfully made the case for real-time content, and secured substantial resources to expand the technical infrastructure and team.
Core Responsibilities: Product Vision, Strategy, Planning, Stakeholder Alignment, Design & Cross-functional Leadership, Team Building and Coaching.
Team: Ron Robinson – Art Director, Chelley Sherman – Senior Graphics Engineer, Michael Clement – Senior Real-time Engineer, Nathan Rosquist – Real-time Engineer, Nicole Johnson – Real-time Engineer, and Taylor Shechet – Senior Technical Artist.
Experience Design & Creative Development Framework
Goal: Establish the Aesthetic Vocabulary and Experiential Basis for Sphere Immersive Experiences.
Challenge: Sphere is a first of its kind highly complex medium that had no precedent or established visual language. Very few people have experience creating content in this format, and no one had experience making content for this scale.
Action: Create a process, framework, and toolkit to guide creative development. Align stakeholders and cross-functional partners to undertake the process of creating design guidelines, human factors benchmarks, and testing process required to achieve our goal. Create and test content based on the framework. Include thematic provocations to serve as brand-aligned creative intent and direction for test content.
Result: Design Guidelines and demo content library that helps teams understand how to create effective content for Sphere.
Core Responsibilities: Vision, Strategy, Planning, Stakeholder Alignment, Framework Creation, Design, UX Testing, Copywriting, and Creative Direction.
