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Introducing The Lab, our incredible technology and art exhibit at the Panorama festival

Introducing The Lab, our incredible technology and art exhibit at the Panorama festival

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The Panorama music festival is coming up soon, and we're so excited about it — it's where our focus on the collision of technology, science, art, and culture comes to life with headliners like Kendrick Lamar, LCD Soundsystem, and Arcade Fire. And today we're very excited to announce The Lab, where that collision comes into even sharper focus in a collection of digital innovative installations created by New York artists. The Lab is a 70-foot video dome that acts as a fully immersive 360-degree VR theater, all powered by our sponsor HP.

Designed and curated by META.is, The Lab features seven digital art experiences ranging from a cotton candy theremin to a seemingly infinite wall of lights and mirrors. We've been working with META and the artists for couple weeks already, and we can't wait to show you everything that's in store at The Lab — in the weeks leading up to the festival, we'll be showcasing many of these artists in the series of videos that offer behind-the-scenes look at their creation. The full list of artists and what they'll be displaying is below, but trust me — you have to see some of this to believe it.

The Panorama festival, headlined by artists like Kendrick Lamar, LCD Soundsystem, and The Arcade Fire, takes place July 22nd through the 24th at Randall's Island Park in New York. Join us. You are one of us. Be there.

The Lab consists of three distinct elements: the exhibition, the Façade, and the Dome:

The Façade: Produced by VolvoxLabs, the façade encompasses the entire exterior of The Lab and serves to heighten the visceral experience for the attendees. The ultra-high-definition video will be projection-mapped onto the surface of The LAB creating a new visual journey throughout the festival.

The Dome: Visually produced by Invisible Light Network and Dirt Empire and sonically produced by Antfood, the 70 foot dome allows 400 festivalgoers at a time to experience a 360 degree virtual reality theater.

Exhibits at The Lab, presented by The Verge and powered by HP:

Cotton Candy Theremin, created by Emilie Baltz & Philip Sierzega (Creative Coding by Charlie Whitney and Audio by Antfood), is an interactive performance piece that remixes the interface of making cotton candy by transforming it into a multi-sensory orchestration. By spinning a cotton candy cone over wisps of candy floss, festivalgoers trigger sounds and visuals that transforms a Cotton Candy Machine into an instrument for play.

Visceral Recess, created by Future Wife, is a highly-responsive playground for festivalgoers. This inflatable structure encourages bouncing, hugging, rolling, and squeezing to create a unique auditory and visual environment of the surrounding area.

Hyper Thread, created by Dave & Gabe, is a large-scale interactive sonic experience that invites the audience to explore, manipulate, and create sounds in real time through tactile engagement. Via a series of silk cocoons inside of a larger undulating silk envelope, tension and movement of the audience are translated into various components of the 3D soundscape and immersive lighting environment.

Infinite Wall, created by Gabriel Pulecio, is an interactive installation consisting of mirrors, lights, and sounds that responds to an individual's presence. Equipped with a motion sensor, the sculpture can capture the position of one or more festivalgoers and trigger a ripple in time resulting in an ever changing visual and auditory environment.

Giant Gestures, created by Mountain Gods, plays with the idea of our small finger gestures that we use to operate our mobile devices suddenly becoming supersized body language movements. Here, festivalgoers will be given the opportunity to manipulate an oversized touch sensitive phone screen through the use of giant props. Tapping, swiping, and playing mobile games takes on a new personality as simple micro gestures are reinterpreted for the human body.

The Art of Pinball, created by Red Paper Heart, reimagines the experience of a vintage pinball machine, into a tool of digital art performance. The delightful clicks, hums, and whirs of a mechanical machine are all grounded in real tactile sensation. The installation imagines the world around these tactile responses and explores what it means to turn pinball into an instrument of performance. As festivalgoers play the game, visuals appear to emanate from the machine itself and rise above into dynamic compositions. A player's actions become larger than life, turning a mere game into something to behold.

Reflection Study, created by Zachary Lieberman, is based on a series of software explorations of how light reflects and how festivalgoers can paint with light by using different techniques such as refraction and caustics. A special light table will be created to allow the festivalgoers to interact, explore, and create with light and shadow in an exploratory way.