A while ago our team had this crazy idea.
What if we could send a VR rig to the edge space?
Great idea, right?
We thought so too.
Turns out though, it’s not that easy to do.
But we decided to try anyways.
Hey space cadets, Trace here for DNews.
Now with a project like this there are definitely going to be some hurdles to overcome, and
we had two big ones.
One, how do you launch something to the edge of space and two, how can we record video
there in extreme environments?
Well, to launch something high into the atmosphere we used a weather balloon.
These high altitude balloons can, like the name suggests, go extremely high, and they
have the ability to take a camera rig along for the ride with some sort of stability.
Obviously I'd love to use a rocket, but they don't trust me with rockets.
Weather balloons aren't sexy, but they're dead useful.
Launching a weather balloon to the heights that we were hoping to reach involves a lot
of planning and experience…
something we don’t have in this area.
So we flew over to Indiana to hook up with Stratostar, an education-first weather balloon
company.
These guys are experts, and could help us boldly go where we’ve never gone before:
the stratosphere.
Stratostar had launched many weather balloons before; they know how to use complex tracking
systems, monitor weather patterns and of course, coordinate with the government.
Basically, we didn't want to try this at home -- and you shouldn't either, by the way.
“Everybody thinks about airplanes...what happens if this thing hits a plane?
The FAA put together guidelines on launching these types of balloons...you got to meet
all those different criteria and coordinate with them and let them know what’s going
on.”
The morning of the flight we had to get up before the sun, both for video recording reasons
and the fact that there was a storm coming in.
We drove out to a rural area, a place where are better that our rig lands in an open field
and not on top of a skyscraper.
Once there, we got to work, filling the latex balloon with enough helium to get it out of
the troposphere.
I helped out where I could, but Stratostar's guys definitely knew what they were doing.
Now, while the balloon is being inflated, let's talk cameras.
We only had 12 and a half pounds to work with, so we used really small, 4K cameras.
You can't just strap them onto a balloon; we had to build a rig.
“Not only did it have to film and have the cameras and lenses at certain angles, it also
had to not weigh much and use materials that are allowed by the FAA.
Not very dense materials and still have structural integrity, that it can handle the turbulence
of the entire flight.
We used a lot of high density foam, and created a harness to go around the outside so all
the forces go around the outside of it.
And secure the cameras in a unique fashion so there's basically no way they can fall
out, but we can still access the functions of the camera and the SD cards and make sure
it can all fly.”
And that’s just the exterior.
There were also problems inside the rig that needed to be dealt with.
“One of the biggest challenges we had was dealing with the heating of the cameras.
If we tried t--o film with the internal batteries they’d overheat in minutes.”
This isn't like your high-end gaming PC.
We can't shove more fans in there to keep everything cool.
You might not realize it, but cameras, they heat up when they're sucking all those electrons
out of a battery for long periods of time.
At sea level, they can get warm, but the air moving around the camera keeps it cool enough
to keep working.
Unfortunately, the higher up you go, the less air there is… no number of fans can make
up for that.
We solved the problem by using large external batteries, which were tested in both a vacuum
chamber and a refrigerator; because not only is the pressure at high altitudes 10% of sea
level, but temperatures drop well below free zing.
Together, we built a custom box that could withstand the violent flight, yet still record
as long as we thought was possible.
The batteries were tested.
The balloon was full of helium.
The day was as clear as it was going to get.
The government gave us their blessing.
So, now all there was to do was launch.
Stage one is successful, the balloon is off!
Onboard is our four camera rig, plus tracking equipment so we could follow it.
Now, we just had to wait... and watch.
Best case scenario was that the balloon tops 100,000 feet, recording the whole time before
falling back to Earth in a convenient retrieval location.
Worst case scenario and probably more likely: the balloon is blown into another state, and
lands on top of a tree (they have a slingshot in case that ever happens).
Of course it could also land on private property.
The landowner doesn’t have to give us permission to go get it.
The whole box could break scattering our equipment across Indiana.
The balloon could get caught in a lightning storm.
The GPS tracking device could fail and we could never find it.
Or, the cameras could die after 5 minutes, and we wouldn't even know until we jumped
through all those hoops to get it back.
Luckily for us, it landed about 8 miles away from where we started.
In a nice flat bean field, with friendly owners that let us grab it.
So, stage two, the retrieval, went about as well as it could have.
But now the moment of truth.
After months of planning, testing, and more planning…
did the batteries last long enough to get it all?
Did all four cameras work the whole time to ensure a full 360 experience?
Did the lenses remain clear enough or fog up with moisture?
Did everything go wrong?
We made it back to the Stratostar office, and the team began going through
the footage.
You can see the results of this crazy experiment is over on the brand new Seeker VR channel...click
to find out if our mission to the stratosphere was a success.
As always thanks for watching and don’t forget to subscribe to DNews.