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Oculus Archives - VR Playhouse Immersive Content for VR and AR

Oct 31
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VR Evangelism from the floor of a Russian Tech Conference

By | Festivals Conferences MeetUps | One Comment

At this moment of uncertainty, with tensions rising and accusations flying and an evil orange stooge puppet running for president, the people of Russia rather nobly invited VR Playhouse to come visit their country. They invited us to come talk about virtual reality at a tech conference but we like to think maybe also to broker a new kind of understanding between our country and theirs. So we sent Dylan. He’s harmless and, if you squint, he could maybe look a little Russian. And Dylan, as he is want to do, spent a day chronicling his adventures: 9am: It’s morning in Moscow and I’m rolling out of the Marriott Novy Arbat with my fellow non-Russian invitees, on our way to the Open Innovations Forum. We’re an eclectic mix of “entrepreneurs” and “experts,” ferried to Russia to speak on the various stages and panels that the forum offers over the course…

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Feb 04
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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 25
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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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Apr 07
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Adventures in VR Storytelling, Part I

By | Storytelling | No Comments

The emergence of a new means of narrative happens, on average, about once every twenty-five years or so. This is a very inexact estimation, about as inexact as my definition of “narrative means.” Let’s just say that the means is the way in which a person receives their stories. So, for instance, in the 20th century, there were three big ones that emerged. First, there was film. Then came television. And then came video games. You could maybe also argue that comic books constitutes its own system but there have been serialized adventure stories with illustrations for quite awhile so is that really its own narrative conveyance? You can see what I mean about inexact. But so anyway, the point is that each of these systems came with their own rules and parameters and ways in which they function in partnership with the human brain and it took awhile for everyone to figure it all out. We’re…

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Jul 29
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Making High-Concept 360° Video

By | Technology | No Comments

The learning curve has been sharp, but we’re getting a better grasp of 360 video creation every day. First, let’s recap: We began our efforts in 360 video from scratch. Initial challenges:  What gear do you use? How do you stitch the videos together? WHY WON’T THESE VIDEOS LINE UP? (If you’ve tried your hand at stitching, you know what I’m talking about). We began with the 6 camera 360Hero setup. It worked. Both the Beach Day Video and El Matador Cliffs video were shot using six GoPros. However, there were what we call “glitches in the matrix.” More cameras = more coverage, we decide. We up our game and settle on the 10-camera 360Hero setup for shooting and Kolor’s AutoPano programs for editing. Our latest video, Dreaming Downtown, uses this 10 camera set up. We also up the production value on this video. Like most experimenting with 360 video, the beach videos allow you to…

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Jul 18
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Immersive Experience vs. Screen Watching

By | Storytelling | No Comments

I love movies, and probably watch 3-4 per week via the usual portals: Netflix, Hulu, VUDU, and Amazon Prime. Don’t even get me started on the TV shows. I don’t anticipate that immersive VR experiences will ever change the appeal of watching a movie play out in front of me, especially since I can watch while also doing work on my computer.  Much of the work I do involves tedious laptop editing, etc., and having something playing on the TV is pretty much the go-to for getting it done. But obviously, we over the Playhouse have fallen head over heels for VR. So let’s not say that VR and Oculus are going to make movies obsolete (we still listen to radio, right?), but what you get from the VR experience is different and deeply satisfying. The first thing I feel inside the Oculus is privacy.  I feel like I’m in my own little…

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Jul 14
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Virtual Reality | The Dawn of a New Story Telling Era

By | Storytelling | No Comments

“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…

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