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Feb 25
1

Our Music Video with Honda and Moses Sumney has dropped!

By | 360 Video, News | No Comments

A few months back, we got to work on a 360-degree music video collaboration with Honda, the production company m ss ng p eces and singer/songwriter Moses Sumney. And now, that video, “Music From Every Angle,” has hit the interwebs! We’re really proud and excited for this one. Technically, we got to take on some new challenges and perfect some new solutions. And we got to work with a tremendous musician and some amazing partners to create something truly unique for Honda. So give it a look! Watch Moses seemingly multiply into a whole army of soul singers, moving throughout the space, banging on Honda Civics like they were drumsets and using all 360 degrees to give us a truly memorable experience!  

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Feb 04
0

VR Playhouse is going to SXSW!

By | Festivals Conferences MeetUps, News | No Comments

  Here’s a piece of news that we’re very excited to share: “The Surrogate,” a narrative, virtual reality experience VR Playhouse co-produced with Peter Flaherty and Logan Brown, is a finalist in the VR/AR category at SXSW’s Interactive Innovation Awards. Melding 360-video with a computer-generated explorable environment, The Surrogate immerses viewers in the consciousness of a female protagonist whose point of view they control as they explore the photorealistic passageways snaking behind the walls of a modern house. The viewer can see into the rooms of the house through a series of portals in which live action, hemispherical videos offer an immersive vantage point. The viewer is able to choose how they experience the narrative by moving through the passageways autonomously, deciding how they follow the action, and which rooms they look into at any given time. As the story begins, we learn that our protagonist suffers from an anxiety…

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Jan 31
0

VR Playhouse is at Sundance – Days 6 & 7: New Frontiers

By | Festivals Conferences MeetUps, Technology | 2 Comments

Our last two days at Sundance were probably my favorite, and not just because we were all kinda exhausted and spent more time than usual lounging around in sweatpants in front of our condo’s fireplace, which is, let’s face it, why anyone is drawn to a wintery vacation environ like the one Park City offers in the first place. Also though, I went through my two favorite VR/AR experiences of the festival on Wednesday. The first was from ILMxLAB and used 3D projections and motion tracking to create an immersive Star Wars Holo Cinema scene for its audience to enter into. The second was called Real Virtuality. You play this with a friend, each of you wearing a whole litany of sensors to track your actual movement as you work together to complete tasks and advance through a virtual world composed of familiar, genre settings like a deserted spaceship or…

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Jan 27
0

VR Playhouse is at Sundance – Days 4 & 5: Party On!

By | Festivals Conferences MeetUps | 3 Comments

Monday and Tuesday were sorta open-ended days for us. We knew there was going to be a lot to do but we didn’t quite know when we would do them or how we would do them or even if we could fit it all in before we dropped dead from exhaustion and malnutrition (an outcome still very much in play). So, in the interest of my own sanity and longterm health, we’ll fire off some quick highlights from days 4 & 5: In The Eyes of the Animal: This is a VR experience from the fantastically named Marshmallow Laser Feast offering a kind of impressionistic take on life from the perspective of an animal. It’s a great example of the kind of reality that the VR industry is increasingly trafficking in, one that doesn’t adhere to any kind of naturalism but rather tries to capture the inner life of its subject….

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Jan 25
0

VR Playhouse is at Sundance – Days 2 & 3: Demo Derby!

By | Festivals Conferences MeetUps, Technology | No Comments

Days 2 and 3 were all about the demo. We planned to go big at the VR Fest event on Sunday, bringing with us an HTC Vive, complete with some new sample content we banged out in a week; an Oculus showing “The Surrogate,” a narrative piece we helped develop that combines CG with 360 video; and, of course, a Gear stocked with a bunch of our work from the last year and a half. Now that means two computers, two monitors, 3 headsets, a tracking system, cables galore, our big flashy sign and so on and so forth. And we took all this on a plane, which automatically means something or somethings is bound to be screwed up when you arrive at your final destination. So Saturday became a day of troubleshooting. We went to the friendly neighborhood Best Buy twice. Various members of the VR Playhouse team banged…

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Jan 23
0

VR Playhouse is at Sundance – Day 1: We saw a moose!

By | Festivals Conferences MeetUps | No Comments

We’re here! At Sundance! We’ve got content to show and content to see, and merriment will ensure. So we’ll be posting here everyday with some initial impressions on what we’re seeing (some VR but, mainly, celebrities!!) and on what we’re doing (demoing! schmoozing!! skiing!!!) So far, we landed last night at 9:30pm, were at our condo by 11:30 and arrived at the New Frontiers Premiere Party at midnight which, if nothing else, shows our steadfast commitment to a gathering. And then when we were being dropped off afterwards, we saw two moose, a baby and a mama, like 50 feet away from us. This was absolutely the thrill of the evening, might even be the thrill of the week. Those animals are huge! I would not, for any amount of money, get in between that mother and that baby. Super majestic, a good omen and a good reminder now that…

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Jan 19
0

Journeys Into And Out Of The Remarkable VR POV

By | Storytelling | One Comment

I saw “Death Of A Salesman” for the first time at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1997. I was 16 years old and just starting to stumble into what it meant to be an adult and as I watched Willy Loman, crumbling under the weight of so many different familial and societal pressures, miraculously, I started to recognize myself. I saw myself in that 63 year old salesman and in that 50 year old play. And so even though the play is a tragedy, I didn’t walk away sad. I was instead reassured because I knew that the same fears I was just then facing lived in everyone else too. I knew I wasn’t alone. One of the great joys of interacting with art of any kind is the journey you take to find yourself in it, to uncover your own reflection there, as hidden as it may be, and…

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Oct 26
0

How Not To Suck At VR (and other fun things)

By | 360 Video, Technology | No Comments

This is a guest post from VR Playhouse’s beloved Head of Production, Derin Turner. Sometimes he gets frustrated.  Over the past year, we have been hard at work here at VR Playhouse, experimenting with virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, astral-projecto-realities.  Some things have worked, others not so much.  We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve gone on spiritual journeys to rediscover ourselves and the meaning of life. We’ve broken a lot of things. All thanks to the wondrous world of VR.  And through all of this, we have learned a lot.  Things that we now want to pass on to you, so that we may spare you some of the pain that this gloriously sadistic medium inflicts. The first thing we’ve learned is this: At it’s core, the idea of VR is to transport your brain-noggin to alternate planes of existence.  It is an illusion.  And an illusion must be flawless….

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Sep 28
0

Cereal in the Age of Virtual Reality

By | Storytelling | No Comments

So Kellog’s announced that they’re going to be rolling out limited-edition cereal boxes that will include build-your-own VR viewers, akin to Google’s DIY device, Cardboard. They’ll have their own app too, with 360° videos that will reportedly include first-person rides on a mountain bike and a wingsuit. All of which is pretty cool. Nevertheless, we can’t help but wish that instead of generic action sports footage, Kellog’s had looked inward, to their own cereal brands and, more importantly, the worlds that were created to sell these cereals. Speaking as someone who grew up watching a lot of kids TV programming and, therefore, a lot of ads for cereal, some of those worlds are bonkers-level crazy. The cartoon psychedelia these commercials often traffic in, combined with crystal-clear intentions for their characters (usually, “get the cereal!”), makes them perfect for VR. Here are the five most perfect: Fruit Loops The tagline for…

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