Toe-Tapping Tech: The World’s First Virtual Reality Musical
Unlike a typical film that utilizes extras as background filler behind the main shot, in VR the people in the background could easily move to the foreground, depending on what the viewer decides to set their gaze upon. While you can attempt to guide their view through action and movement, being overly prescriptive with this defeats the purpose of the virtual reality experience—viewers are supposed to have curious eyes, otherwise it might as well be on a traditional screen. If extras are static characters, the realism of the experience is suddenly thrown off balance.
Because of this, Howard and his team decided to write individual story arcs for every single person in the film—all 36 of them. “We never really called them ‘extras,’ they were really more of a supporting cast,” he says. “The replayability factor of this is interesting, because while the film may only last four minutes, if you want to watch every story arc and uncover all the details, it might be a 45-minute experience.”
See the full story here: https://www.ceros.com/blog/vr-musical/