News

2022.10.14

The volumetric-based XR content <SAMUL>, produced by the Art and Technology Lab (AT Lab) of the Korea National University of Arts (President Daejin Kim, hereinafter referred to as K-Arts), has been officially invited to the immersive section of the 30th Raindance Film Festival in the UK.

* Volumetric: A technology that captures a person's movement in a chroma key background studio equipped with hundreds of 4K-level cameras to create 360-degree three-dimensional video

** XR: Extended Reality, encompassing Mixed Reality (MR) which includes both Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)

※ Raindance Film Festival: https://www.raindanceimmersive.com/#/samul/

Founded in 1993, the Raindance Film Festival, with branches in London, New York, Vancouver, and others, is an international indie film festival. The Raindance Immersive section plays a leading role in discovering and supporting experimental content using cutting-edge visuals like virtual reality and gaming.

The volumetric-based XR content <SAMUL> (directed by Ark Park and Sngmoo Lee), to be showcased by K-Arts AT Lab, is an XR content that captures the performance of Duksoo Kim's Samulnori group in high-end volumetrics and reinterprets it in VR space with various particle effects.

<SAMUL>, a project that transforms the performance of Duksoo Kim's Samulnori group, the founder of Samulnori, into a virtual reality space, thereby modernizing traditional art, is a work that was developed and completed by the Korea National University of Arts AT Lab. It was initially supported as a 2021 content campus project by the Korea Creative Content Agency and was further refined through an industry-academic cooperation with SKT, utilizing state-of-the-art high-end volumetric capture equipment to elevate the content to a global standard.

The creator of this work, Sngmoo Lee, the director of the AT Lab and a professor in the School of Film, TV & Multimedia, described the project as “a work that introduces traditional arts in a new light on the international stage, combining the Korea Creative Content Agency's leading support program and SKT's advanced technology with K-Arts' creative education system." Ark Park, the director (Master of Fine Arts multimedia at the School of Film, TV & Multimedia), expressed his emotion on entering the international film festival, saying, "It's deeply moving to be able to share the music and performance of Duksoo Kim's Samulnori, a Korean traditional culture, with the world through cutting-edge technology.

The 'Content Campus Construction and Operation' is an ambitious project promoted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency. It aims to develop and operate innovative educational programs through the establishment of an educational cooperation system involving industry, academia, and government, with the goal of nurturing future-oriented key talents. Starting in 2018 with support for a consortium of four universities, the project has expanded to support 19 university consortia by 2022.

K-Arts AT Lab, which has been implementing this project for five years, is a creation and production research institute aimed at the fusion of science, technology, culture, arts, industry, and education. It has produced works such as <Scarecrow> and <Rain Fruit>, which have been continuously invited to major international avant-garde film festivals like Sundance, South by Southwest (SXSW), Tribeca, and Cannes Film Festival XR. The lab has won numerous prestigious awards, including the highest award in the Immersive Media category at the Raindance Film Festival and the Best Technological Innovation Award at the Sandbox Festival. Additionally, it has ongoing industry-academic collaboration activities with leading domestic and international companies such as LG U+, SKT, and TikTok, and conducts joint research in the field of advanced convergence with technical universities like POSTECH and KAIST, leading the trend in the global advanced content sector through the fusion of art, technology, and industry.

Maengseok Yang, the head of SKT's Metaverse CO (SKT Jump Studio), who supported the volumetric studio and technology for this work, said, "We are delighted to support our volumetric technology for a work invited to a world-class film festival." He further stated, "We will generously provide our technological capabilities in preserving culturally valuable intangible assets like Duksoo Kim's Samulnori.