Sundance panel tackles future of VR in entertainment
Award-winning filmmaker Eliza McNitt premiered her new VR series, “SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime” on Friday at the festival. The 13-minute film is an entirely VR, immersive experience of two black holes colliding in space. Narrated by Jessica Chastain, the film makes the viewer feel like they are floating in space, completely surrounded by exploding stars and bending light.
However, one issue with making movies a VR experience is not only the lack of proper equipment in theaters, but because we are also “bumping up against the limits of what computing can do,” Schilowitz said.
“How do you break beyond the flat screen to include temperature, wind and smells?” said Diego Prilusky, head of Intel’s new studio division.
When asked what Adobe is currently working on to help further the tech for VR and immersive content, Bobotis said he couldn’t say, but that there would likely be two big releases later this year — with one announcement expected at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in April and another at the Adobe MAX Creativity Conference in October.
See the full story here: https://www.ksl.com/?nid=1205&sid=46242160
Sundance: Felix & Paul Debut Space Explorers VR Series
Felix & Paul’s newest experience, Space Explorers: A New Dawn, premieres at the Sundance Film Festival New Frontier Exhibition this week. After the premiere, it will be available for free alongside its second chapter, Space Explorers: Taking Flight, with the launch of Oculus Go this year.
NASA’s Principal Virtual Reality Engineer and several astronauts shared with me how they are using VR to prepare for future explorations throughout our solar system.
Space Explorers: A New Dawn introduces visitors to NASA’s new generation of astronauts, Jessica Meir, Jeanette Epps and Victor Glover, the depths of what space exploration entails for them now, and the ambitious plans for the near future.
Lajeunesse shares that the second chapter, Space Explorers: Taking Flight, takes visitors on an exploration of “…the collaboration between NASA and private space companies such as Space X and Boeing, as well as the spirit of collaboration between the world’s national space programs.” Viewers visit Cape Canaveral, Russia and Kazakhstan, and also experience two up-close rocket launches.
Storytelling in VR not only takes you to new places, or allows you to be someone or something else, but it has the ability to give you experiences that enhance your life in a way that other mediums cannot do. The drivers of why we seek out immersive experiences hint at how essential great educational content is in driving VR adoption.
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/space-felix-vr-nasa/
IMMERSIFY – INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR VIRTUAL REALITY
Immersify, a European R&D consortium made up of the following partners: PSNC – Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (Poland), Spin Digital Video Technologies GmbH (Germany), Ars Electronica Futurelab (Austria), Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes (France) and Visualization Center C (Sweden). Immersify was set up in October 2017 and runs until March 2020. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 7620799.
Immersify Focuses on Four Points
Immersify is concentrating on four challenges. First of all, what’s needed is a new technology for the video compression of data, which is virtually exploding due to higher resolutions, frame rates and constantly improving image formats. Second, media players and formats should be able to support as many different technical environments and devices as possible. Third, creative individuals working with high-quality videos, CGI in 2D and 3D, as well as interactive elements ought to have the option of combining them with each other so that users are in a position to enjoy totally customized experiences. Fourth, Immersify is definitely not to be developed behind closed doors; rather, the intention is to present the ongoing progress of R&D in the form of demos at the Ars Electronica Festival and the Marché du Film in Cannes, where specially developed content and innovative market-oriented products will showcase Immersify’s creative and technical capabilities.
See the full story here: https://www.aec.at/press/en/2018/01/18/immersify/
Amazon Pushes Athletic Wear in Augmented Reality with Mo-Capped Fitness Models
The retailer took a fairly unique approach with this new AR experience. Mission clothing was displayed on virtual animated fitness models, which users could place in their physical space. While the models performed their exercise routines, users were able to rotate through various Mission apparel styles and colors.
The AR content took shape via Groove Jones, a studio specializing in 360-degree video capture for virtual reality content. To create the experience, Groove Jones filmed fitness models with motion capture technology (see below) in order to construct the animated 3D models.
See the full story here: https://next.reality.news/news/amazon-pushes-athletic-wear-augmented-reality-with-mo-capped-fitness-models-0182227/
Fable Studio: Oculus Story Studio Alumni Form New Studio to Push Boundaries of VR Storytelling & Affordability
“Where we’re going is not VR movies anymore. It’s characters who live with us and who we believe in,” said studio co-founder Edward Saatchi, pointing towards the future of character-building.
Fable says all of its future projects will be paid experiences, something they hope will “kickstart a new phase in VR movies of charging for content and seeking to break even.” The studio will charge $1 for every 10 minutes of content, meaning a 20 minute experience would cost $2. Considering how arbitrary pricing seems to most people right now, setting a standard pricing model could give smaller studios incentive to start creating VR narratives.
Fable Studio’s Upcoming Projects
Origin
A group of artists work together to solve a virtual reality scavenger hunt to recover stolen art.
10
10 is an illustrative realtime documentary using Quill to explore a real life story.
Derailed
A social virtual amusement park ride with the theme of sleep anxiety.
Magic River Yacht Club
The viewer follows a giant salmon and its crew up river as they compete in a 500 mile regatta.
Nicolas Cage makes the leap to virtual reality in new movie
The movie, which is a near-future science fiction tale about global warming, will release "as a standalone episodic virtual reality series [called] The Humanity Bureau VRevolution," according to a report in Variety. It's just not clear what that means, exactly.
Producer Kevin DeWalt told the trade magazine that The Humanity Bureauwas shot in three formats: standard theatrical, "Barco Escape" theatrical (a gimmicky three-screen setup), and VR. His comment suggests that you'll be able to watch the full movie in VR, but that isn't quite it, apparently.
Variety notes that VRevolution is "based on" the main film, and that it "takes the user through alternative storylines that co-exist with the feature film, but can be viewed as standalone episodes."
See the full story here: http://mashable.com/2018/01/17/nicolas-cage-humanity-bureau-vrevolution-virtual-reality/#eexKvcPcjkqG
Disney hits reset on mobile games with new development partners
Disney executive Kyle Laughlin announced today that the entertainment giant has hit reset on its game strategy and formed new relationships with four development partners.
Disney will work on future games with Ludia, Glu, Gameloft, and PerBlue. These are all established mobile game publishers, and each is working on a new unannounced game based on Disney’s franchises, Laughlin said. He made the announcement at Casual Connect USA, the game conference in Anaheim, California.
Disney shut down Avalanche, the 250-person studio that made Infinity in May 2016. Warner Bros. picked up a big part of that team. Disney also shut its Marvel: Avengers Alliance, an internally produced mobile game, and it also recently shuttered Marvel Heroes, a massively multiplayer online game made by outside studio Gazillion, which also closed its doors.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/16/disney-hits-reset-on-mobile-games-with-new-development-partners/
What a Hologram of Maria Callas Can Teach Us About Opera
When Maria Callas appeared onstage at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Sunday night, she looked a little pale, a little spectral.
This was understandable, perhaps: She has been dead since 1977. This Callas was a three-dimensional hologram, the latest in a series of musical-visual resurrections that have included Tupac Shakur, Michael Jackson and Ronnie James Dio. She shared the program, in fact, with Roy Orbison, who died in 1988.
Arguably the greatest singer of the 20th century, Callas — eerily, well, radiant in a white satiny gown and rich red stole — was recreated for the occasion, down to the minutest movements of her hands and the subtlest facial gestures. Her voice, in arias from Bizet’s “Carmen” and Verdi’s “Macbeth,” came from her own recordings, backed by a live orchestra at the Rose Theater. We in the audience saw only about 30 minutes of what will eventually be an evening-length concert. (The finished program, created by a division of the company Base Entertainment, begins an international tour this May in Tokyo.)
In introductory comments, Mr. Wadsworth said that the project has tried to present Callas with “restraint, subtlety and delicacy.” The notion of a singing hologram might seem incompatible with such a goal. Yet moments during Sunday’s preview were surprisingly affecting.
But what is the point of this spectacle? Who is the intended audience? Callas, a symbol of chic, remains an object of fascination extending even beyond opera fans. Perhaps the hologram will introduce some newcomers to her incredible artistry; I’d urge everyone to listen to Callas’s extensive discography.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/arts/music/maria-callas-hologram-opera.html