VR Playhouse's slate of summer classes kicked off this past weekend with a 2-day 360 Boot Camp, held at our studio in beautiful Los Angeles, CA. The class covered a...
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INTRO: A little over a hundred years ago, the light switch was invented in the sleepy suburb of Lynbrook, New York. If this fact isn’t enough to convince you of...
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Our creative director Dylan wrote this for the theatre site Better Lemons last week. As a former dramaturg (fancy, weird word for someone who helps develop new plays), he has...
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Filmmaker Fifer Garbesi wrote a wonderful blog post on her efforts to bring VR to the artists and thinkers of Cuba; efforts that our very own co-founder, Ian Forester, had the opportunity to help with. They were recently in Havana shooting 360 footage for an upcoming documentary and hosting the island’s first VR Festival. It was, by all accounts, pretty amazing, opening the door for some great creations and collaborations to come! Read all about it here
Let’s be real. Virtual reality is having a moment. Headsets are shipping, people are talking and VR is popping up all over pop culture in weird, interesting ways. It feels sweepingly omnipresent all of a sudden, like there was this plan in place to make VR a part of all of our lives and now that plan is in motion. And so people ask me what it’s like to work in the virtual reality industry. This is a hard question to answer in an interesting way. It’s difficult? It’s exciting? It’s crazysexycool? Yes. But also: Working in virtual reality is like being a first year resident on a primetime medical drama Not that I ever watched “Grey’s Anatomy” because for sure I never did but somehow I know that the pilot episode covered the first 48 hours in the residency of Meredith Grey and friends, just like the pilot episode…
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….
Check it out! It’s a pretty great compilation of the work we’ve been doing. Big shout-out to VR Playhouse editor/legend/tha Gawd Derin Turner, who put it all together. Enjoy!
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…
The concept of presence, of being virtually and magically transported to a place, real or imagined, and having the feeling of truly being there, has always been and will continue to be, one of the chief selling points of virtual reality. But that concept of presence, and the value that VR gives to it, becomes much more complex when we’re talking about a place and an experience that no one would want to be present for. Such is the case when it comes to “[08:46]”, a new VR piece that recreates the events of September 11, 2001 from the point of view of an office worker in the World Trade Center’s North Tower. I can only guess as to the motives behind the creation of “[08:46]”. Whatever they may be, it is ultimately the prerogative of its makers. It’s a free country and, as with so many controversial works of art, if…
Recently, I was up late at night watching Jackass 2. You should know that I consider this to be an important part of my job at VR Playhouse. In one of the film’s stunts, the team had built a full pipe that they were trying to ride using what looked like a tiny, two-stroke pocket bike. The sequence mainly consisted of riders falling, over and over, taking their trademarked joy in their own pain. And then one of them pulled off the trick, riding this toy motorcycle all the way around the loop-dee-loop and, presumably, on to glory. It made me think about one of the more famous moments in skateboarding history. It happened at the 1999 X Games, when legendary skater Tony Hawk landed the first ever 900 in competition. It was a cool moment made exceedingly more dramatic by the way in which it was done. Hawk would fail ten…