Pearl (2016), a 360 animated short film from director Patrick Osborne and Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP), has landed an Academy Award nomination for this year’s best animated short film, making it the first VR film in the running for an Oscar.
Pearl is an emotionally-charged ‘coming of age’ tale of a single father raising his young daughter on the road. Presented as a vignette spanning the life of both the father and daughter, you sit as an unnoticed observer in the little hatchback’s passenger seat.
“It’s a story about the gifts we hand down and their power to carry love. And finding grace in the unlikeliest of places,” writes Google ATAP.
Pearl is Osborne’s second Academy Award nomination following the Disney-produced animated short Feast.
The full 360 video is available below for viewing both on traditional monitors and VR devices. The video can be viewed using the YouTube app for Android or the Google Spotlight Stories app for IOS.
Jaunt, the cinematic VR company, has today revealed 5 different content deals slated to go into production in 2017, one of which—love it or hate it—will be based on the seminal ’90s VR flick The Lawnmower Man (1992). And no, neither Pierce Brosnan nor Jeff Fahey have signed on to reprise their roles as the eccentric scientist Dr. Lawrence Angelo and the intellectually disabled gardener Jobe Smith.
Partnering with rights holders Jim Howell and Rupert Harvey to develop and produce a reimagination of the film, Jaunt is making the low-fi, sci-fi cult classic into an original, scripted, multi-episode series for VR headsets.
“The original movie was a film of unsurpassed imagination and creativity with its ground-breaking use of VR back in 1992,” said Jim Howell. “Together with Jaunt we look forward to a contemporary team bringing to life a whole new world of VR; a world of immersive entertainment and communication. We are very excited to be working with Jaunt to create a VR realization of the film.”
Since it’s still on the drawing board and doesn’t go into production until later this year, we can only speculate on what sort of content a we’re in for.
While we’re sure to get some of this:
We’re not really expecting much of this based on pure cringe-factor alone:
Founded in 2013, Jaunt has completed 4 funding rounds totaling over $100M, the most recent being a $65M series C investment led by The Walt Disney Company. Jaunt is developing VR camera hardware (Jaunt ONE, the 3D 360 light-field camera), software, tools, and applications for VR content creators.
Besides the upcoming Lawnmower Man VR series, Jaunt and its content partners are starting production in 2017 on 4 others:
Miss Gloria
A multi-episode series from New York Times Bestselling author, Daniel H. Wilson (Robopocalypse, How to Survive a Robot Uprising). Set in the distant future, the series situates the user in several distinct points of view as a “Robot Hero” tracks down a young girl who has gone missing during an uprising.
Luna
A 12-episode sci-fi suspense series created by Adam Cooper & Bill Collage (Assassin’s Creed, Exodus: Gods and Kings) to be directed by Robert Schwentke (The Divergent Series: Allegiant and Insurgent, Flightplan). LUNA follows an ensemble cast navigating an abandoned lunar base which results in them experiencing fear unlike anyone has felt before.
The Enlightened Ones
An episodic VR series written and produced by Tye Sheridan (X-Men Apocalypse, Ready Player One) and Nikola Todorovic of Aether, Inc. The series is set in an alternative present where a device is discovered bringing immortality to the human race. After the general public is given access to this technology, the world’s governments form an organization to control the crisis of overpopulation.
Bad Trip
A six-episode stoner comedy series from writer/director Todd Strauss-Schulson (Harold and Kumar 3D). The series will place the viewer in the hyper-visual and uncomfortable situation of taking various drugs in environments that are less than ideal.
Content distribution platform and VR studio Within is partnering up with FoxNext, a recently created immersive media division of 21st Century Fox. The new partnership is promising to “bring viewers a new slate of virtual reality experiences this year,” the first of which will be based on Fox’s Planet of the Apes franchise.
The first VR project, based on the dystopian sci-fi film, will be directed and produced by Within Founder and CEO Chris Milk. The creators say the project will utilize artificial intelligence to deliver a shared social experience that will be available on the Within app and across both VR and AR platforms.
Image courtesy 21st Century Fox
Annapurna Pictures will also be partnering with Within and FoxNext to create an original VR film called I Remember You (working title). Milk is set to produce and direct the film, and develop alongside award-winning director Spike Jonze and Annapurna Pictures Founder Megan Ellison. The film will be available through Within, an app that is available on SteamVR for PC VR headsets and Oculus Home for Gear VR.
Annapurna’s VR titles have included Evolution of Verse, The Click Effect, and two upcoming projects Life of Us and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Protectors for National Geographic, both of which are currently at Sundance and will see a general release on the Within app in 2017.
Within announced a $12.4m series A funding round last June, taking on a number of investors from established media including 21st Century Fox, Annapurna Pictures, Legendary Pictures, and Vice Media.
“Virtual reality is the next generation of entertainment and PLANET OF THE APES provides the perfect canvas to create a new kind of filmmaking experience that will further immerse fans into the franchise,” said Salil Mehta, President, FoxNext. “In partnership with visionary filmmakers like Chris, and companies like Within, Fox will continue to push the envelope to create immersive experiences that bring audiences into the action like never before.”
Kevin Mack is a digital fine artist and prolific visual effects designer known for his work across films such as Fight Club (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Fifth Element (1997), and What Dreams May Come (1998) for which he won an Oscar. Outside of supervising VFX for big budget Hollywood films, Mack creates abstract surrealist art, realizing them as 3D printed sculptures, 2D renderings, and now through his newly founded VR production house Shape Space VR, immersive virtual reality experiences that let you explore his strange and beautiful globular creations up close and personal. Enter Blortasia.
Blortasia is his second public VR art piece, arriving a few months after the pre-rendered 3D 360 video Zen Parade for Gear VR. Created for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch, Blortasia is a real-time VR experience that lets you fly in and around the abstract sculpture using either system’s hand controllers, and letting you freely explore the universe’s undulating, cavernous structure in the sky. According to Mack, Blortasia is an exploration of virtual reality as an aesthetic medium, one that is necessarily unconstrained by the limits of ordinary reality.
Accompanied by a calming soundtrack, I can’t help but feel a deep relaxation as my brain goes on autopilot while I watch the living, breathing lava lamp before me. Like watching clouds, I see faces, hands, objects—a neurological illusion thanks to a phenomenon called Pareidolia. I exit Blortasia a little more refreshed than I went in, a little more aware of my physical world outside virtual reality.
Even the platform below your feet shifts in color and shape
To learn more about the nuts and bolts of the experience, I spoke with Kevin Mack about how it was made.
Mack tells me that among custom-made animated shaders for Unity and other techniques created by himself, Blortasia was built using tools and rule-based procedural systems in Houdini, a procedural content creation software from SideFX.
The results, Mack says, are a type of “directed randomness that are hybridized and seeded with manually created elements.” So while Blortasia’s textures aren’t entirely random, but are rather derived from images painted by Mack in Photoshop, Blortasia obeys what he calls “a natural system where the rules of nature are aesthetically defined.”
This means that the starting structure of Blortasia is fundamentally always the same, but it undulates over time and is painted with different colors that are recalculated when you start the experience, something that makes the sky-bound creation appear different each time you visit.
But what about the name, Blortasia?
Mack told me it wasnamed after the self-coined word ‘Blort’, an acronym deriving from the process that he used to create the otherworldly sculpture. Blort stands for “blobs that have been rotated, translated, and scaled.” Whether the neologism catches on or not, one thing is for sure: Blortasia is exactly what virtual reality was intended for—bringing to life something vibrant and alive that would otherwise be impossible in our daily physical reality.
Trebuchet, or not to trebuchet? There really is no question when it comes to Siegecraft Commander, a tabletop strategy game that combines traditional real-time strategy (RTS) elements with a unique base-building mechanic that’s designed to significantly change the way you create structures and attack enemies. By making you physically fling—as in, put in a slingshot and shoot out—everything from explosive barrels to defensive buildings like outposts and armories, Siegecraft successfullygameifies the most banal part of traditional RTSs and summarily smothers what might otherwise be a dynamic and interesting game.
Developer: Blowfish Studios Available On:SteamVR (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift) Reviewed on: HTC Vive, Oculus Touch Release Date: January 17, 2017
Gameplay
In Siegecraft, your base is composed of essentially two main types of buildings that help create a sort of fractal defensive web:
Primary Structures
From the heart of your base, called ‘the keep’, you launch outposts, which are essentially self-replicating nodes that allow you to grow your base larger and closer to the enemy. Primary structures are useful for manually destroying the enemy’s keep or any pesky foot soldiers that slip by—accomplished by launching explosive barrels. But more on that later.
Primary structures let you create secondary structures like armories and garrisons, and also some limited defensive structures like land-to-air ballistas. If the enemy knocks out an important node in your primary structure chain though, it destroys everything linked to it from that node forward, effectively undoing a lot of your work.
Selecting secondary structures in ‘Siegecraft Commander’
Secondary Structures
After placing a primary structure, you can then have to option to select a number of secondary structures. Placing an armory for example opens up a new branch of the tree, letting you create infantry barracks, and gads of defense structures—all of which are basically dead ends when it comes to growing your base though. Because secondary structures can’t build primary structures, you need to think tactically about how to get past tight terrain, and advance through the map without filling a crucial bottle neck with a library or a mortar when you actually need an outpost to help push forward.
After a successful match, it almost feels like Siegecraft has me creating a sort of primitive intelligence, like a brainless slime mold that eventually takes over a Petri dish bit by bit. And while I really want to like Siegecraft solely based on this self-imagined premise, the activity of physical launching structures is consistently unnerving and just comes too close to ‘unnecessary gimmick’ territory for comfort.
Sure, launching an explosive barrel at an enemy outpost should rightfully require a keen eye and a good understanding of how the launch mechanic works, but hampering forward progress in the heat of a match because you launched an outpost too close to a rock, or too close to a river, or too close to your own building, or the wall that trails behind it is too close to anything—you begin to ask the most important question of all: Am I having fun yet? Because I’m honestly not sure. I should be worrying about the enemy marching at my gates, and not aiming, pulling back and whiffing my second outpost on a row.
Admittedly, the game is available in two flavors, turn-based and real-time, so you can dial down the chaos if you so choose. While I played the real-time single-player campaign, online multiplayer is also available in both flavors, but I wouldn’t risk being matched with anyone using the PC or Xbox/PS4 simply because of the disadvantage of playing in VR. Moving your POV to get a good look at the game board, fiddling with unit selections and physically reaching back to fire every 20 seconds takes both time and patience in VR, something RTS players know is in short supply. Simply put, I found game’s VR mode too encumbered for the all-out chaos of real-time strategy play.
Immersion
The beauty of motion controls in virtual reality reveals itself almost immediately when you try it in a made-for-VR game. Picking up items and interacting with them as if they were actually there is something magical, something that we’ve never been able to do as a species before in the digital realm. Since Siegecraft is more of a VR-mode than a bespoke VR game, both general object interaction and haptics are an absolute afterthought, and there’s certainly no magic to be had using either Vive controller or Oculus Touch (which still renders as the Vive controller in-game).
While you do have a beautiful controller skin and a ever-present book glued to your hand so you can read some of the game’s useless story banter, I can’t help but feel that the game would benefit more from gamepad support—not a damning verdict by any means—and a complete removal of the book in favor of voice overs for campaign mode.
Immersion-wise, finding a comfortable angle to see the gameboard takes time to suss out, because too far away and you can’t accurately select units, and too close… well, you get this:
Instead of sacrificing some of the inherent coolness of a unified color pattern and architecture for the VR mode, the game insists on using labels so I don’t feel lost. The problem is, I feel more lost with the labels on the otherwise beautifully rendered gameboard, truly underlining this as a PC-first, VR-second game.
Comfort
Since Siegecraft Commander doesn’t require room-scale locomotion, and can be played entirely from the seated position if you so wish, users may suffer slightly from manipulating the gameboard too much, as you can grow in size and rotate the board to see better. This sort of world-shifting is known to cause nausea if exaggerated, but Siegecraft offers enough opportunity to rest in between so that little to no discomfort was felt personally.
You may also be tempted to look down at the board to get a good bird’s eye view most of the time, but keeping your neck pointed downwards with a VR headset can be a big pain in the neck after a while if you’re not careful.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
