CMU School of Drama


Thursday, January 21, 2016

The VR Company Helping Filmmakers Put You Inside Movies

WIRED: Look, you’re never going to get to drive the Fury Road with Max and Furiosa. You’re just not. It’s a bummer, but it’s true. However, if you want a mini taste of that post-apocalypse life and you happen to be at the Sundance Film Festival sometime in the next week, then you’re in luck: 8i’s virtual reality experience The Wasteland awaits.

3 comments:

meeshL said...

Okay-- WHAT?!?! THIS IS AMAZING! I've been a long hardcore fan about virtual reality technology and I really do think its creation was a huge breakthrough not only for the video gaming industry but for the rest of the visual and performing arts. Can you imagine if they created a VR game where you were underwater in the deep ocean, swimming alongside all sorts of exotic and foreign creatures? I'm giving myself chills just thinking about the possibility of such an experience. Anyway, the technology that i8 is releasing at Sundance is absolutely phenomenal. The fact that they now have the ability to render a full form with volume and body is incredible because it gives the believable sense of a human form which in actuality isn't there. I feel like this may be the closest we have to holograms that aren't just 2D projections. I've never personally experienced any sort of VR technology, but I sure as hell would love to.

Monica Skrzypczak said...

Ok, this is really cool. They have made a way to digitally represent people without having to do complex motion capture and it only looks like mid 2000’s video game graphics except the process is so cool. Virtual reality has always interested me since I first found out it could be a thing. What I want to know about is how they are going to deal with the the movement of the observer. How can you stop yourself from running into a wall or tripping over something if all you can see is the VR? But at this point it’s just worth it to be able to use the four foot radius or so that the video shows. The being able to walk all the way around the character and get a personal connection to them made me think of how cool would it be if we could use this for a Skype call kind of deal. The only thing would be that you would each be seeing the other with the VR helmet which would be hilarious. This 8i technology is going to open a lot of doors in communication, movies, and games.

I just thought of something else. You remember how the VR of the presidential speech was so bad because you had to stay in the same spot as the camera? Now if they put the camera’s around the speaker and use this technology, watching the speech would be so much more interesting.

Unknown said...

VR is both way closer and a lot farther away than we think it is. The advances in what we can do with media creation are careening along and both the HTC Vive and it’s competitor the Oculus Rift are just reaching their full release timeframes. What VR is going to be missing however is the early adoption, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the first generations will probably struggle with driver support and will rely on the customer to provide relatively top grade hardware to power their games at the requisite minimum of 90 FPS. It will probably be several years before computer hardware manufactures and the VR headset makers are able to deliver performance, an absolute necessity in VR, at a price that your average consumer can stomach for a personal entertainment device. This should by no means lesson the importance of the rapid content creation advances we see today because this is going to be the tools used to create content to drive the eventual widespread adoption of this brand new technology.