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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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.
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…
Christmas came early for the good little boys and girls of VR Playhouse! We got the fancy toys!!! First up, the GoPro Odyssey: 16 synchronized HERO4 Black cameras, all controlled from one remote, for high-resolution capture. And it is, of course, compatible with… The Google Jump Assembler: This bad boy stitches in a matter of hours to create perfect stereoscopic 360-degree video. This means no more audio sync worries. No more color matching worries. No more mismatched settings. No more days spent cleaning all that stuff up. It potentially saves our clients thousands of dollars in post-production costs and saves us thousands of dollars in Red Bull and aspirin costs. Finally, Sennheiser’s virtual reality microphone, which allows for simultaneous high quality capture of ambisonic audio via four-channel, XLR output and plugs into any existing four-channel recorder. Audio tracks can be brought into audio software seamlessly. So sweet! I should…
It was with great delight that we teamed with Jaunt VR, the Latin Grammy-nominated all-female mariachi band Flor de Toloache, Leyenda Dance Company and the beatboxer Musical Mammal to create “Fuerza Imprevista,” a cinematic VR experience celebrating Mexican heritage. This was shot at the jaw-dropping Vibiana’s in downtown L.A. using the Jaunt One camera. Thanks to everyone who contributed their talents and technology! You can download the full virtual reality experience 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…
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!
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…
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….