philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Oculus is now making its own virtual reality movies – VR Cinema

The prominence of virtual reality has been one of the biggest stories of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and now Oculus itself is stepping into the fray to highlight the importance of storytelling in VR. The company has pulled back the curtain on Oculus Story Studio, an internal team focused on exploring the potential of what it calls "VR cinema" — and the group's first movie is debuting this week.

Called Lost, the project is a real-time computer generated VR experience for the Crescent Bay prototype, and is directed by Saschka Unseld, a former Pixar animator who created the 2013 short The Blue Umbrella. Lost runs roughly five minutes in length, but in what Unseld touts as one of the project’s innovations, it changes the pace of its storytelling based on the action taken by the viewer. "It could be three-and-a-half minutes and it could be 10," he says. "It all depends on you."

The Oculus story team is small, currently just around 10 people. Iribe and Unseld say the goal is to stay nimble so they can shift as the medium evolves creatively in the months ahead

See the full story here: http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/26/7896179/oculus-vr-story-studio-original-movies-sundance