Lauren Ludwig, the director of our upcoming 360° narrative short, Girl, got a nice shout-out in LA Weekly’s year-end roundup. The immersive dance theatre dinner-party piece she directed, And The Drum, created with her company Capital W, was listed as one of the best and most innovative live performances of the year. See the list here.
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…
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…
“We should film people trying the Oculus Rift for the first time,” Ian says to me. It’s the same every time. Friend sits on couch, puts the Oculus Rift on his or her face, and below the ski goggle mask, a big smile emerges. Nobody puts on the Rift and isn’t totally blown away. I’m taking my friend Reyna through the developer’s kit demo, an animated virtual reality world of a small Tuscan villa. You start the demo inside the house, where you can look up at the vaulted, beamed ceiling, or down at the hard wood floor, at the staircase behind you, or out the window. By pushing the arrow keys on the computer, you can move out the door to a beautiful courtyard, where you realize you are on what appears to be an island. “You want to fly?” I ask her. A resounding yes. I push the =/+ sign on the…
