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….
Exactly one month ago, the Thursday of Burning Man, we brought out the GoPros. We arrived early to set up, been exploring for a week, and decided it was now or never if we were going to attempt to shoot 360 video at the infamous, beloved festival we call “home.” This is the story of how we did it, what went wrong, and luckily, what went right. BURNING MAN 2014. LOCATION: CAMPOLINE, 8:30 & C. We built our usual reflective foam board Hexayurt, this year with solar power so that we could charge the cameras and computer. We brought both of our 6 camera rigs (One is Freedom360, the other 360Heroes), as well as our 360Heroes 10 camera set up. We had 12 GoPro Heros, 2 tripods, one unlucky MacBook Pro, and a bunch of USB chargers. We shot Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was a particularly dust-filled year, so you can imagine the shooting conditions were less than…