Nat Geo ‘Hexadome’ Has 6 Screens, 52 Speakers, and 360° Storytelling

In collaboration with Little Cinema and directors Sam Gill and Luke Neher, National Geographic has created an incredible six-screen immersive cinema experience at Disney’s annual D23 event in California.

Utilizing the Institute of Sound and Music Berlin’s (ISM) state-of-the-art Hexadome, Little Cinema’s expert team cut and edited together content from more than 25 National Geographic series, films, and documentaries, including some that have yet to be released, to fit the Hexadome experience.

D23 visitors basically go inside the Hexadome, a few dozen people at a time. They are surrounded by six large screens and 52 speakers, which feature over 500 spatial audio channels and clips. It’s a carefully tailored 360-degree audio-visual experience and an exciting technical achievement.

“My favorite thing thing is watching people’s face of wonder,” Little Cinema’s founder and chief creative director Jay Rinsky tells PetaPixel over the phone from the D23 exhibition floor. “You get that reaction from a lot of people, you can just see feeling and emotion on their faces.”

“Seeing people’s reaction and their incredible delight has been really exciting to experience,” echoes National Geographic‘s marketing and communications director, Chris Albert.

Albert tells PetaPixel he’s personally seen the roughly 10-minute Hexadome experience maybe a hundred times already, and he sees something new each time.

“My true hope is that we find an opportunity to showcase [Hexadome] again, or at the very least use this technology for something else,” Albert adds, noting that the six-screen, 52-speaker setup can’t travel quickly or be used in a lot of places at once (it’s one-of-a-kind). “I’ve been working in this business for a long time and I’ve never really experienced anything quite like it.”

That many viewings is quite the achievement because the Hexadome experience requires being there in person, and the setup is temporary. Previews on a single screen, like what PetaPixel saw ahead of D23, don’t do it justice.

Rinsky explains that the team does the best it can editing video and audio for the Hexadome using more typical cinema-grade screens and speakers. Still, some fine-tuning requires being on location with the Hexadome built and ready to go, which happens a couple of weeks before an event.

The Little Cinema team even calls on experts from ISM to help dial in the perfect audio mix.

“Three of their audio engineers flew from Germany to Anaheim and spent the last week dialing the system even further into the space,” Rinsky explains.

While the most obvious part of the Hexadome is the six big projector screens, audio is essential for the experience for numerous reasons. Beyond the obvious immersion that good audio provides, the team also dials in the audio mix to provide auditory cues for viewers to know where to look at different times.

Telling a story on a single screen is very different from using six screens. You can look in one place at a time, after all. So the team has found ways to use certain audio tracks and speakers to invite people to put their attention on a specific screen for a big moment.

“A storyteller, a National Geographic director as a storyteller, they’ve got one screen. Their audience is always focused in that single direction where the story takes place,” Rinsky says. “In this installation, you’re surrounded by six screens. So, you’re in the center of effectively a circular space, and the audience is used to just consuming content in one direction. We really want to make them turn around and remind them, and that’s the experience design component. And that is 100 percent led by sound.”

Storytelling is a huge part of what Little Cinema does, too. Rinsky and his team work with existing content not shot for the Hexadome. The team has to pull it apart, dissect it, and then put it back together to tell the core story differently.

While that aspect of the National Geographic Hexadome Experience isn’t necessarily new or different from Little Cinema’s prior projects, Rinsky says the Hexadome at D23 differs from what his team has created in a big way.

“What makes this one really unique is the shared experience component of it,” Rinsky explains. “Everybody is inside the dome together having a silghtly different viewing experience and turning around. It can hold 50 to 75 people at a time going through this experience.”

“It’s the ultimate cinematic experience in a concentrated space.”

Each person can have a different experience inside the Hexadome and come away having seen something different from their neighbors.

A particularly powerful segment shows clips from Free Solo, an Oscar-winning Nat Geo documentary about free solo climber Alex Honnold pursuing his lifelong dream of scaling Yosemite’s El Capitan. It’s a thrilling event and a heart-stopping documentary.

In the standard one-screen version, people can only see one thing at a time. So one scene may show Honnold, another shows one person watching him climb with excitement, and another cuts to a person watching with much more panicked emotions. With Hexadome, all these shots can be edited together to show on different screens, dramatically changing the intensity and meaning of any particular screen. The added context is a huge deal.

“In traditional linear storytelling, you’ve got the person that they got to look away because they can’t comprehend that he might fall. You’re cutting to a closeup of his foot climbing, you’re cutting to a wide angle showing the cliff that he’s kind of building on. And all these clips exist at the same time in the hexa where you’re at the center. So you’re catching the main story by seeing him hanging on the cliff and you look to your right and you see somebody else that’s observing with you and has to look away and you’re seeing the closeups. All of these are condensed into a single timeframe experience.”

The Hexadome promises a truly incredible experience, and D23 attendees seemed universally blown away by it. From a technical and narrative standpoint, it’s unlike anything else.

Image credits: National Geographic, Little Cinema