Neil Carty: Spherical Storytelling and Shared Reality at Cosm

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to the FoST Podcast.

One of the most extraordinary experiences of being inside virtual reality is when you look around in every direction and feel like you’re in the middle of the action. But despite the limitless creative opportunities of 360-degree storytelling, VR has real limitations. The headsets currently available are bulky and expensive, and the experience can be lonely, being often designed for only one person at a time. To overcome this isolation, Cosm, a global immersive technology company, has created an 87-foot diameter dome with 8k LED screens that wrap around the space, immersing you and hundreds of others inside and experience all at once. Their intention is to create innovative programming, both prerecorded and live streamed, that will help bring people together for an immersive social viewing experience. As someone who’s gotten used to watching much of my content alone on small screens, when I went to Cosm, it was truly awe inspiring.

Cosm opened its first two venues this year in Los Angeles and in Dallas, with another already planned for Atlanta. They recently raised $250 million in a fundraising round as part of their ambitious global expansion plan. My guest today, Neil Carty, is VP head of Cosm Studios and Labs. He’s here to tell us more about the company, its history of innovation, and his mission to help encourage and support creatives working in spherical storytelling. Without further ado, here’s Neil Carty.

Neil, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the FoST Podcast. Welcome.

Neil Carty:

Thank you, Charlie. I’m really excited about this.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell us what Cosm is.

Neil Carty:

Cosm is an immersive media technology and entertainment company, and over the past 75 years, we’ve built some of the most prestigious and advanced full owned planetariums in the world through our pioneered software technology and display. We’re bringing that to our large scale immersive entertainment venues. We’ve launched two one in Los Angeles and Dallas with third coming in Atlanta, and that experience itself bridges both the physical and digital worlds to create what we at Cosm refer to as shared reality.

Charlie Melcher:

And I’m fascinated about the theatrical, the screen experience in that dome. So give us a little more of the sense of the tech and what one would experience when they go.

Neil Carty:

It may be a relatively new organization for some of the folks listening to this podcast, but our company is built on 75 years of legacy business. In 2020, we acquired a company called Evans and Sutherland, which is the dominant software and technology provider for most of the full dome and planetarium theaters around the world. The technology that powers the venue and our display is built on one of the first gaming engines in the world in 1981 in Digistar and what we call our CX software now powers that entire immersive experience and the display itself, everything is built to end to end by our team at Cosm. It’s a 12K display with a cap on top of it, so it provides incredible immersivity, whether we’re transporting people to the sidelines of a football game or front row of a concert or inside of an immersive art space. You truly feel this sense of–and I’ll steal a word from one of our favorite creators, Nancy Baker Cahill–ergonomic awe when you’re inside of this space where it truly transports you.

Charlie Melcher:

I had the pleasure of going to experience the one in LA recently. Thank you very much, and I got to see the film that you made with Cirque de Soleil, “O”, and that was extraordinary. It’s so beautiful. You really feel like you have access to the show in a way that you don’t when you’re sitting in the theater in Vegas, seeing that show you’re so much more close to it above it on the sides of it, it really did feel remarkably intimate, I guess is a word I would say, and I guess that’s because it’s so large and so high resolution, you really can see everything in such amazing detail.

You mentioned that this is based on 75 years of experience of the company. Remind us of the kinds of things that the company’s been making outside of the things that are for this new venue.

Neil Carty:

Yeah, so Evans and Sutherland has an incredible legacy in technological innovation. The organization sits on the campus of University of Utah and everything from the first head on display back in 1968 for VR to computer graphics and flight simulation software and really harnessing all of that technology, the legacy that’s been built by that organization and putting it more in a consumer-facing component. We have a vast network of planetarium, full dome theaters in the world, almost 800 for that matter, and in almost every single market, some of the biggest customers in the world, and then layering on top of that established business in the projection space, bringing in LED technology really creates an unparalleled experience. It’s not about cannibalizing a live experience. I think we can all agree that being at the best seat in the house and front row and sideline, there’s no replacement for that energy, but we’re bringing people closer.

Charlie Melcher:

So a lot of people who would’ve first experienced this type of imagery would’ve done it probably at a planetarium, right? As a kid.

Neil Carty:

Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I feel like life comes full circle. My first immersive experience was at a planetarium, right? I think that planetariums are like the OG immersive media. Ironically enough at space camp in 1987, a system in Huntsville, Alabama, which now by the way, Cosm provides, right? We work with them, they’re incredible partners. So here I am—well, I’m ashamed to say—it’s 25, 30 years later working in that space, but also the sheer number of creators that have been out there building in a spherical canvas in the full dome that now with the distribution network that we’re building creates a tremendous amount of opportunity not only in the science space, but in more broadly entertainment and art and sports. Who would’ve thought that this is an environment where sports could be in, but it’s perfect. It’s a curved canvas. You feel like you’re there, you feel like you’re on the sidelines, you’re with the fans, and as I mentioned earlier, democratizing access to some of these incredible events where sometimes those seats can be cost prohibitive. We’re getting you closer to the octagon in UFC or we’re getting you behind the goalpost in English Premier League. I mean, it’s really quite incredible.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s talk about this as a platform for live sports because it’s certainly one of the things that you all have leaned into the most heavily. I read that you have content partnerships with the NBA, UFC, ESPN, NBC Sports, Fox Sports, Turner Sports. I mean, you clearly have that as a priority and a focus for your model. Tell us more–why?

Neil Carty:

We have an incredible team and incredible legacy of sports talent, including our CEO Jeb Terry, who was an NFL player. So bringing a lot of those big marquee sporting events to Casm has been just a great pleasure, and these are all some of the most widely accessible events in the world, and the beautiful thing there is that we can think about how do we programming around live programs on one side of the business, but then everything that’s being done on the original side allows us to bring in new audiences. And what I think what’s been really interesting to see is some of that overlap, right? Sports is a universal entertainment genre. Everybody loves it, but finding out if we can bridge that gap between other areas to get them to see other things, we’re just finding a lot of that cross-pollination to be very exciting at all hours of the day.

I should add time differences where you can feel like you’re at an Arsenal match or Liverpool, it may be early in the morning, but people are sort lining up in droves to be able to be part of that fandom and that fandom that we talk about, we refer to that as shared reality. So shared reality is this bridge between physical and digital worlds, but at the same time, it’s about this deep emotional connection that people feel with the content, but more importantly with one another, right? You want to see that game with a friend. You want to be in that experience with a friend. You can share that at Cosm.

Charlie Melcher:

It does make a lot of sense to me, the sporting approach, in part because I think we’ve always enjoyed watching sports together, whether that’s at home or on the television or going to the big game and college football on the weekends in the stadium, but this seems to me to be a kind of reinvention of the sports bar to the most cutting edge level. Would you agree with that?

Neil Carty:

Yeah, I think that’s the beautiful thing about the design of our venues. At one particular time, you will think it’s the best sports bar in the world, and that same evening or that afternoon for that matter, you may feel like you’re in the most advanced museum in the world. It’s really a vessel for a lot of different content and different audiences to come in. If you’ve seen some of the ambient content, which I’m sure you did when you were there, we have a team that’s just capturing high resolution content from all over the world where you’re transported to the Matterhorn or to Paris, and there’s really tremendous amount of opportunity to just change people’s mindsets about what they’re experiencing and where they’re experiencing it.

Charlie Melcher:

It seems to me that this is a kind of outgrowth of our recent fascination with virtual reality and the growth of 360 cameras and being able to document the world in more than just one specific point or inside one small frame. What is that relationship between virtual reality and Cosm’s venues?

Neil Carty:

Yeah, I mean, look, we have a lot of heart for VR. We’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world in that space. We also do quite a bit of work in the VR space. Those same teams that are capturing content at various sporting events, we’ve distributed that content inside of headsets. So I think the beautiful thing about headsets, and I’m a lover of VR, it’s very much of a one-to-one experience where you have more agency, you can control the entire journey, all the perspectives, whereas we think more in what is the broader spherical canvas that you can be creating for. So VR is one instance that that may happen in, but if you want to do it together, you want to be in a space where you feel almost tech less, and that despite us having incredible technology all around you, I think if we’re doing our jobs right, the technology sort of disappears and you just feel the experience.

Charlie Melcher:

I know that a lot of people felt that frustration with VR, that at first there was this sense of magic because you were in the middle of a experience, you’ve had that sense of presence, but it was one person at a time. It was a clunky headset, it was expensive. There wasn’t a big network of people who had the headsets. There was just really an economic challenge, as you said, for throughput. Also, sometimes people feel vulnerable in that headset. You can’t really do that in public because you can’t see. So there were a lot of reasons that it wasn’t really taking off as quickly as we had all hoped. For example, Mr. Dolan at MSG, when he went about creating the Sphere, one of his inspirations was this idea of, I want to be able to do virtual reality for everyone without the headsets, I want to be able to put 17,000 or whatever the capacity of that place is into an experience where they feel that sense of presence and surrounded by the power of 360 storytelling without having to wear something clunky on their heads. It seems to me Cosm is coming from that same place. Do you get that comparison, first of all, to the Sphere sometimes?

Neil Carty:

Oh, of course, of course. And look, what I’ll say is I love what the Sphere is doing, and I love what James Dolan is doing, and I agree with that thesis. How do we create something that’s more scalable? What I’ll say is we’re very different businesses. While I’ve been to Sphere three times and amazing, right? There’s live performance inside of it, our view of live is slightly different, and also our experience is a little more intimate. You feel like that you can literally touch the dome, or it’s a smaller footprint where you can be a little more close to the action, where you’re not surrounded by as many people. As we roll out more and more venues around the country and the world, it just creates more opportunity for more access and that also on the same side, on the content side, we have the ability to really be very diverse in the content that we’re creating for a lot of different audiences, but also mass, where our footprint is 2,000 people, not 18,000.

So we can focus on some of these other groups and embrace lots of subculture fandoms to impact the aggregate. Anything that fosters that spherical storytelling and that canvas makes it a whole lot easier, and it certainly has made it easier when people say, oh, I’ve seen Sphere. Well, there’s a Cosm in my own neighborhood and it doesn’t require us to get up and go to Vegas, and we want to make sure that people are coming back again and again to Cosm that they don’t feel like it’s a one-off trip that you’re making. And it’s a special occasion. There’s a special occasion literally every week to go and see something that’s playing at Cosm.

Charlie Melcher:

Perhaps also part of the enthusiasm for the business model is that there’s such a hunger to figure out what’s the future of cinema. There’s been a sort of shrinking business there over time, and some of it’s gone into just people watching at home with all the streaming. They’re not going to theaters to the same degree, and so what is that future for out of home for location-based experiences that we want to do with other people and are worth getting out of the bed and turning Netflix off to go do? And I think you guys certainly can tell a very good story about how the growth of movie theaters, it could be similar for the growth of spherical cinema.

Neil Carty:

Yeah, we’re not trying to be competitive with movie theaters. I think I love that industry. I love the cinematic experience, and there’s something unique about going into a theater and in the way that I lived at the Independence most of my life. But I think increasingly, consumers just want more to get them off the couch. We have a screen in our pockets, so what is that larger event or reason that people are going to open up their wallets and more importantly open up their calendars? We look at these venues as a way we can be programmatic like it’s a television station in the morning. It may have one particular type of content, different audience. We can flip that on a millisecond if we wanted to. So we look at really having a diverse set that’s inside the space. We’re also looking at what are other areas throughout the course of the day? Is there wellness and meditation? I think that’s something that’s exciting to me. Is there documentary storytelling that’s done, assuming that you take in those principles of how do you tell a story on a canvas? I kind of always joke, not everyone’s face is meant to be in a 12k closeup at three stories tall. So you have to think about the new tactics that you take to bring in a cinematic experience in a way that’s meaningful.

Charlie Melcher:

And tell us about the kinds of work that you’re looking to support in your content studio.

Neil Carty:

We have four pieces that are out right now live at Cosm Los Angeles and Dallas. One is a film called Orbital by our friends at Planetary Collective, who by the way, I met for the first time at FoST like 10 years ago, and I think I said, Hey, guy, we’re going to work together someday. And sure enough, that just worked out serendipitously.

Charlie Melcher:

Love that.

Neil Carty:

“Orbital” is about experiencing the overview effect, understanding what it feels like to be an astronaut and seeing it for the first time, and creating a deeper connection with our planet. Nancy Baker Cahill is a very talented, immersive and contemporary artist who, well, since we started working with her in “Seek,” which is another piece that sort of beckons you to look closer at the world around you and listen more intently and understand some of the environmental crisis that the world is facing. She’s also in the Whitney and LACMA and who knows how many more. So we love the idea of bringing an artist to view this canvas as a place beyond the four walls of museum. Another interesting thing that really is focused on the music component, Liquidverse. This is a piece that was done that also you’re getting a sense of some of the space themes that happen here, but Ricardo and Liquid Light Lab and his partners at Metropolitan Ensemble, they recreated the universe inside of a Petri dish using liquid visuals.

So you may walk out of that and say, oh, that looks like the best CGI in the world. They were there literally with alcohol and different liquids to recreate what you see with a 118 musician score that is designed to put you inside of the orchestra. You will feel like you’re sitting in the pit of it. Now, to answer your question, we look at a lot of different content. I think the three big buckets we looked at in this past slate were experiential cinema. So how do we place people in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes? Very akin to what we’ve already seen in VR and other spaces, immersive art. I personally prefer working with living artists versus those that have passed, and both of them we’re looking at. But we like to bring in artists that are not only thinking about how they build for the display, how do they think about the music score, but also what’s the end-to-end experience that an audience member is going through and the impact that we’re leaving on them when they leave.

Charlie Melcher:

I just recently was in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival and went to the planetarium there, and we saw Dark Side of the Moon. There was a,

Neil Carty:

It’s amazing.

Charlie Melcher:

Beautiful piece, and the music is so great, but it’s what I’m thinking of as you’re describing some of the content that could be shown and expanding the range of types of storytelling that could be done in those types of natural science and space museums.

Neil Carty:

Who doesn’t have a story about going to a planetarium when you were in your teens or early twenties where you saw Dark Side of the Moon or Pink Floyd? And I think the evening, what we call alternate programming is really exciting. Music is such a powerful medium too, just to use that. So also we distribute that film to a lot of our planetariums. We didn’t create it, but if you look at some of the slate that we have in the venues right now, it’s certainly a nod to some of that seventies, sixties, like psychedelia and that some of the folks that we brought in for Liquidverse, that I should say that Ricardo brought in, had been doing some of those liquid visuals for Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. So it’s how do you look at things that have worked in that space? How do you layer on a technology and new skill sets to bring it into today’s day and age to kind of continue to blow minds in a totally different way, and you’re going with your father and your son and you’re all connecting over an experience that you may have had at different points in your life.

To me, that’s really exciting.

Charlie Melcher:

Neil, tell us about the Cosm X Labs program.

Neil Carty:

I love this program and innovation and sort of experimentation is built into the DNA of our organization. It was one of the first things that we built. We knew that we had to tap into a market and network of people that know this space really well. So we didn’t have to sort of start from ground one. So we built this Cosm X Labs program, which is an offshoot or a feeder for Cosm Studios. We identify creators that have a great concept, we award grants, and we wrap our entire team really around helping to understand: is the concept viable? Does it hit those shared reality moments that we always talk about? Do they have the technological prowess and ability to build? If not, that doesn’t mean we can’t partner them up with a certified studio that we work with, and we help them understand what it means to create for the technology, like what does it look like to build for the Salt Lake City facility, which is a lower, slightly lower resolution, than the 12k. And then we evaluate them for greenlights, right?

So that’s a process that at any given time, we may have 7 to 10 people running through that. Some of them hit and they’ve turned into greenlights, and then in some cases we may say, “you know what? This isn’t quite a fit for us right now, but we believe in you. We’ve invested in this time, and there’s always an open door.” You have another idea, great. We will evaluate it. We put the time in, and the hope is that if we’ve done our rigor in identifying the right people, the right talent, that someday we will work with them.

What I’ll say also is just that it’s not an easy thing to build for a 12k display, and there’s a lot of tremendous work that the team has gone into. And what we do as a studio is really try to unlock as many resources we can to help upskill these folks to understand what it’s like to build, to set them up for success, ideally for Cosm. But it’s our obligation and my mission to just, like, let’s keep fostering this art of spherical storytelling so it opens up experiences for consumers around the world.

Charlie Melcher:

So what does it take to work in a unique way or organically appropriate way for this medium? How is it different than filming for other things?

Neil Carty:

I mean, the two easiest thing to think about is scale and speed. You’re dealing with a very big canvas, and not everything plays well. And speed—every time we’re talking to folks and we’re testing, we’re always like, slow it down. If the camera movement’s too fast, you’ll feel like the entire platform is moving, and you have to be careful with that. So that’s one thing. And then I think the tools that immersive storytellers have been using since the beginning remain true. How do you think about audio in a way that guides the experience? In VR, you may have spent a fortune on a shot that just went over your shoulder. If you’re not guiding those eyes in the right way, you just wasted whatever, a few hundred thousand dollars. In our sense, we really think about how that space can be utilized from a soundscape perspective. And then the other thing— look, there’s also an appetite to, what does live-live look like inside of it? So right now, we’re of course very focused on bringing those shows to life in the space. But in the instance of someone like Ricardo Romanero with Liquidverse, there is the opportunity to bring in maybe not 118 of those musicians, but 20 of them to also have a live component that allows people to be part of that. These are all the things that we’re exploring and testing to check for viability.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the things that it raises for me is to ask you the question about what do you think of when you say immersive? Because that’s a term that’s used very loosely by a lot of people, and mostly I understood you to mean visually immersive, right, like we’re surrounded by the picture. But do you mean more than that as well?

Neil Carty:

Look, I think immersive is a word that can be very successful. I think also it’s used very loosely. As you pointed out, advertisements are referred to as immersive. Swimming pools are immersive, right? There’s so many things out there that are immersive. For me, immersive is all-consuming and should really envelop all of the senses. To me, that’s what immersive is. And you should also— there’s the post immersive experience. Like, did what you experienced, in an immersive environment, through immersive entertainment, transform you?

I’ll use an analogy that I love giving. I happen to have a 6-year-old, he’s been in the studio half of these recording sessions, and I took him out to our test center in Salt Lake City, which is before we even had the venues built. We have a 20-meter, 8k LED dome sitting on the campus of Evans and Sutherland. And I showed him all the incredible things that our Digistar software already runs for planetariums. And he went back to his kindergarten class at the time, and he told his teacher for show and tell that my daddy took me to space and that he swam with sharks. So we get a phone call, of course, from the teacher that’s like, “Henry’s starting to lie a little bit.” And I was like, well, he kind of is, and he’s kind of not. But you look at the level of imprint that happens, especially on young kids, you feel like you’re there.

Charlie Melcher:

You mentioned the importance of the after experience, and I certainly know from other kinds of immersive entertainment, the ability to process it with others afterwards and to talk about what you experience is so crucial. And I imagine that’s a lot of what happens at the bar, or out on the deck after someone’s seen a show. It’s a perfect place for people to be able to relive or make sense of that experience in dialogue with others.

Neil Carty:

Yeah, we think a lot about the onboarding and offboarding experience. We’d be remiss as immersive producers, designers, whatever, to not. And I think the form factor of the venues really lends nicely to that. So when you walk into the venue, as I mentioned, the hall that’s there, I mean, that’s a massive display that can display information. It could set world setting, placemaking, all that stuff that primes people before they go in. Because you don’t want to scare people when they go into it. You want to give them a little bit of a sense of what they’re going to experience when that goes in. And then at the same time, that deck afterwards, we do want to set a social environment where people can sit down and either have a drink or grab a bite and talk about what they experienced. We want people to feel like they’re at home when they come into the space, that it’s not like a traditional, “Hey, go up the escalator, see the show, leave, go to your parking lot and get out.” No, there’s a lot of happening in that space.

Charlie Melcher:

I love the term that you use: “spherical storytelling.” Right? That we’re looking around a sphere instead of looking at a screen. And certainly one of the big shifts that we’ve seen happen is just going from two dimensions to three dimensions, that the world of storytelling was stuck on these flat planes, whether it’s a screen or a page or a wall. And part of spherical storytelling is that move from two dimensions to three dimensions. We are beings that exist in three dimensions. Why is it that every story had to be translated into two? And there’s a lot of effort, and I always applaud it, to make something that is ultimately more human because it’s happening in three dimensions where we live.

Neil Carty:

The question that we always ask is, “what do you want people to feel?” It sounds so simple, but if you’re not thinking about what you want people to feel and how you want them to be transformed, does it even warrant being in immersive? Maybe that’s harsh, but it’s like if there’s not a feeling and an emotion that’s being elicited? Kind of a waste of time. Then yeah, stay home, watch it on tv, watch it on your screen. But if you want to get transformed and actually feel something, that’s what we’re— what we’re looking for here. So a very simple question, but it has to be very well thought out that I want people to leave feeling, thinking, doing this. And to me, that’s the power of immersive, that it has the ability to impact that.

Charlie Melcher:

Neil, thank you so much for being on the FoST podcast and, as they say to astronauts heading off, godspeed.

Neil Carty:

Thank you, Charlie. It was a pleasure and I really commend everything you’ve done for this community and beyond with FoST, and I’m a lifelong friend to that community, so really appreciate you

Charlie Melcher:

Once again. I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST podcast. Thanks for joining me.

The Future of Storytelling is a community of people passionate about combining next-generation narrative technologies with savvy entrepreneurship in order to bring great stories to more people than ever before. To learn more, check out our website at fost.org. There you can find more episodes of this podcast, sign up for our free monthly newsletter and learn more about our annual membership community.

The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.