Space ballooning hits new heights in an HDTV commercial showing a simple armchair floating against the backdrop of our curving planet, almost 100,000 feet above the ground. When you watch the video, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Wow, that's cool!" And the second thought is probably, "How the heck did they do that?"

"Usually a project like this takes a year or a year and a half to pull together," John Powell, founder of California-based JP Aerospace and one of the key guys behind the Space Chair Project, told me. "But they needed this pulled together in four months."

"They" refers to Toshiba UK and Grey London, the marketing agency that pulled off the project. The idea was to do something remarkable that would tout Toshiba's HD cameras and LCD displays as "armchair viewing, redefined."

JP Aerospace was asked to build a rig that could take the chair and two miniaturized cameras to the edge of space. Powell and his fellow high-altitude balloon experimenters had done similar magic tricks in past years for Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel projects. This was ambitious even by JP Aerospace's standards, however. The job became even more ambitious when the videographers ended up asking for four separate rigs - essentially, "a backup for a backup for a backup," Powell said.

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Posted at 11:52AM Nov 21, 2009 by Lou Wallace in Astound  |  Comments[0]