An Affordable Kit for Volumetric Streaming

At the onset of the global pandemic in 2020, we worked with Movement Artist Valencia James and Creative Technologist Sorob Louie to make hardware that would help artists create new live performances in their own living spaces.

Since the hardware needed to stream volumetric video can be prohibitively expensive for artists, we worked with our collaborators to design and document a low-cost open source Volumetric Performance Kit. The kit consisted of a Raspberry Pi 4 computer, an Intel RealSense depth camera, a USB microphone, and a small tripod. We wrote highly optimized code for streaming and encoding to make the most of the tight limitations of the Raspberry Pi. At the time we created the kits, the total cost was under $300.

We ran a remote artist residency as part of Eyebeam’s Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future program. In the residency, artists across disciplines collaborated to realize live performances in Hubs using the Volumetric Performance Kit.

Learn more about the kit here.