Dinner Party is an immersive exploration of Betty and Barney Hill’s widely known 1961 alien abduction story that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier film festival. Rather than using normal alien tropes, writers Laura Wexler & Charlotte Stoudt chose to use the spatial affordances of VR to present a symbolic representation of each of their experiences to highlight how vastly different they were.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Charlotte Stoudt
Betty and Barney were an interracial couple in New Hampshire, and their purported encounter with aliens was a positive peak experience for Betty, but Barney had an opposite experience that Wexler & Stoudt attribute to his experience as a black man in the early 1960s. Inspired by passages of Barney’s hypnosis recordings posted online, Wexler & Stoudt expanded Hill’s story into an immersive narrative at the New Frontier Story Lab, and collaborated with director Angel Manuel Soto to bring this story to life in a 360 film.
Dinner Party is the pilot episode of a larger series called The Incident, which explores the aftermath of how people deal with a variety of paranormal or taboo experiences. Wexler & Stoudt are using these stories to explore themes of truth and belief such as: Who is believed in America? Who isn’t? What’s it feel like to go through an extreme experience that no one believes happened to you? And can immersive media allow you to empathize with someone’s extreme subjective experience without being held back by an objective reality that you believe is impossible?
Dinner Party is great use of immersive storytelling, and it was one of my favorite 360 experiences I saw at Sundance this year. It has a lot of depth and subtext that goes beyond what’s explicitly said, and I thought they were able to really use the affordances of immersive storytelling to explore a phenomenological experience in a symbolic way. It’s a really fascinating exploration of radical empathy using paranormal narrative themes that you might see in the The X-Files or The Twilight Zone, and I look forward to see what other themes are explored in future episodes.
Google and the NFL today announced season two of Immersed, the multi-episode docuseries following NFL players on and off the field. The first three episodes are available today on Daydream through YouTube VR and the NFL’s YouTube channel.
According to Google’s announcement, the second season of Immersed aims to give football fans an even greater in-depth look at some of the NFL’s most unique personalities. Departing somewhat from the first season, which was a more general slice of football culture, the second season focuses “on players who are making a difference on and off the field,” says NFL Films Producer Jason Weber.
Episodes are broken up into three multi-episode ‘arcs’, which feature a number of players. The first three episodes follow Chris Long, defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles. Future episodes will feature Calais Campbell of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and players from the 2018 Pro Bowl coming soon. Pro Bowl voting is now open, so there’s still no telling who will be featured in those future episodes.
image courtesy NFL
Google has worked with NFL Films to not only help produce the series, but also demonstrate the power of Jump, Google’s platform for VR video capture that combines high-quality 360 cameras and automated stitching. The second season of Immersed was shot with latest Jump camera, the YI HALO, a 3D 360 camera composed of a total of 17 individual Yi camera units.
image courtesy Yi
“VR is such a strong vehicle for empathy, and we wanted to focus the segments on players who are making a difference on and off the field,” says Weber. “Chris Long is having a tremendous season with the Eagles as part of one of the best defenses in football, but his impact off the field is equally inspiring. Calais Campbell is a larger-than-life character whose influence is being felt on the resurgent Jaguars and throughout his new community in Jacksonville. And the Pro Bowl is a unique event where all of the best players come to have fun, and the relaxed setting gives us a chance to put cameras where they normally can’t go, giving viewers a true feeling of what it’s like to play with the NFL’s finest.”
Weber says the Yi Halo’s unique upward-facing camera makes a big difference when capturing football in 360.
“[T]here’s a lot happening in that space that would get lost without it. We can now place a camera in front of a quarterback and have him throw the ball over the Halo, giving a viewer a more realistic view of that scene.” Not only that, the upward-facing camera better captures the pregame flyover. Woosh.
Discovery and Google today announced the launch of a new 38-episode VR video series called Discovery TRVLR, a product of both Discovery and Google’s internal VR teams. The first 6 episodes is slated to launch on Friday, November 3.
Discovery TRVLR comes exclusively to YouTube and DiscoveryVR.com, and on the Discovery VR app. This means you can watch on Google Daydream View and Cardboard, and with a little extra creativity, on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with Opera’s new experimental browser and Gear VR through Samsung Internet.
According to the press release, the VR video series drops you “into the lives of fascinating locals in every corner of the globe across all seven continents, [e]xploring unique cultures through a visceral 360-degree storytelling experience.”
There are seven chapters in the Discovery TRVLR series, each exploring a different continent. Episodes are centered around fascinating locals including the Guru, the Renegade, the Entertainer and the Explorer, who will share the unique rituals, traditions and quests that encompass their culture.
Chapters for North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia consist of six episodes each, while the chapter for Antarctica features two episodes, for a total of 38 episodes in the series.
Saschka Unseld, Emmy Award-winner and creative director at the now defunct Oculus Story Studio, is Creative Producer for the series. Episodes filmed in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe were written and directed by Addison O’Dea and produced by cinematic VR studio Here Be Dragons. Episodes filmed in Antarctica were directed by Barry Pousman and produced by Yes Please Thank You.
STXsurreal, the immersive media division of STX Entertainment, is partnering up with Google’s VR team to launch a new “pay-per-experience” app on the Daydream VR platform, which will host a selection of curated live-action 360 films.
Casting it as the ‘HBO or Showtime of VR’, the deal allows STXsurreal to develop and produce multiple live-action scripted VR series coming to Daydream in the next few months. STXsurreal Co-Presidents Andy Vick and Rick Rey maintain the deal allows them to “bring the highest caliber of talent to this new medium and create a premium destination for VR.”
Setting itself apart from other 360 video apps, the company says they’ll be “highly selective with a true programming voice.”
Surreal, a cinematic VR company that’s produced more than 70 videos with over 35 million views, was acquired by STX in August 2016. The company has produced 360 videos featuring celebrities such as Gordon Ramsay, Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa, John Hamm, and many more.
If you’ve ever worked at a fast food or fast-casual restaurant, you know how the first day inevitably goes. The manager sits you down in some store room, wheels in a TV and makes you watch a training video that’s about as immersive as watching paint dry. Honeygrow, a Philadelphia-based chain of Asian-fusion fast-casual restaurants, is using a VR app that weaves together 360 video and interactive elements to teach new employees how to do their job.
Created by interactive art studio Klip Collective, the custom VR app features an overview of company culture and employee training, and consists of live action with integrated 2D and 3D animations including an interactive game.
image courtesy Klip Collective
Developed for Google Daydream, honeygrow’s vr training app uses the platform’s remote control to drive interactions, something the developers say made it especially easy for VR newcomers.
“We found that people were easily able to navigate through the experience more naturally with the point-and-click interaction of the Daydream controller. This controller made for a more direct connection to the app versus the soft-tap touchpad of the Oculus GearVR. We also used the additional buttons on the Daydream controller to add more input functionality to the experience. One the originally unused buttons was programmed to access a secret menu for internal demo purposes.”
Pre-loading a shipment of Google Pixels with the VR training app, the team provided each of honeygrow’s store a Pixel and Daydream headset so that every new hire will go through VR first before getting to the real thing.
image courtesy Klip Collective
According to Klip’s blogpost, 360 scenes were captured using their new Nokia Ozo, which allowed the team to see a real-time preview of the scene using an Oculus DK2 headset. “Having this option really helped everyone’s comfort level on set and made for an extremely efficient shoot day.” Klip speaks further on the 360 camera’s ease of use in capturing the live action scene:
The Ozo system also allowed us to preview and set our stitches on set. By seeing where the seams are between the lenses, we could frame our shots around potential stitching issues. After each take we could also review playback of the scenes in the headset, letting us know we got the shot and could move on. All of this turned the unfamiliarity of VR live action production into something more similar to a traditional live action production.
Having heard explanations in the hundreds on how to use a VR headset, it’s hard to imagine an easier, more user-friendly approach than plonking down a smartphone into a VR headset alla Google Cardboard—be it for the manager or the trainee. The catch is, unlike Cardboard, Daydream offers a much higher quality VR experience, one that is both more ergonomic and intuitive. Although it requires an impressive piece of kit to run—i.e any Daydream compatible phone—the prospect of starting a new job and being thrown into a near 1:1 ideal of what your daily tasks are without the added pressure to perform, can be the difference between pounding some foreign process into your head, and understanding something immediately so you can move on to the next task.
Check out a preview of honeygrow’s 360 training video below.
Veteran horror director Alexandre Aja, known for his work on The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Pirahana 3D (2010), and Horns (2013), is teaming up with Oculus and VR production studio Future Lighthouse to create a 360 live-action horror series entitled Campfire Creepers that takes you into long-forgotten childhood fears.
The live-action anthology series, directed and produced by Alexandre Aja, takes place at Camp Coyote, the archetypal summer camp. Played out through the scary stories told by a group of campers around the campfire, each story leads to what the press release dubs “an immersive ride into your darkest childhood fears.”
The show is said to be inspired by cult classics Creepshow (1982) and Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996).Campfire Creepers also bills itself as one of the first pieces of episodic VR content created to draw more mainstream viewers into virtual reality.
As an interesting piece of horror history, Robert Englund, the actor known for his role as Freddy Krueger from iconic slasher film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is making a cameo in one of the episodes.
image courtesy Future Lighthouse
Aja and Future Lighthouse say they’re focusing on pushing the 360 medium by utilizing new camera movements, editing, and macro shots. Producer/director Casey Cooper Johnson and director/writer Martin Andersen co-created the show with Aja and wrote the first season.
The production team is already filming Campfire Creepers and first episodes are slated to release this Halloween exclusively in the Oculus Store.
The BBC’s newest VR documentary, Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel, today launched on Gear VR and Oculus Rift. The 13-minute documentary takes you through one man’s memories on a journey back to a defining moment in Irish history, the armed insurrection against British rule during Easter Week, April 1916 that saw the execution of fifteen Irish leaders and internment of more than a thousand people—kindling for the nascent Irish sentiment of self-rule which later manifested in 1922 with the founding of the Irish Free State.
Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel is now available for free on the Oculus Store for both Oculus Rift and Gear VR.
Created by BBC iWonder, Crossover Labs and VRTOV, the story follows audio from Willie McNeive, taken from a 1970s tape recording. With the voice of McNeive as your guide, a participant in the Easter Rising nearly 60 years beforehand, you’re transported back to the streets of 1916 Dublin to see the uprising against the British. McNeive was only 19 years old at the time.
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image courtesy BBC
image courtesy BBC
image courtesy BBC
According to the developers, each scene in the 13-minute story has a fixed point of view, but the viewer can look around in the full 360-degree environment and see the action while listening to recollections of the events in various locations.
The BBC bills it as “an artistic journey into the memory of an ordinary man who was swept up into an extraordinary event.”
Zillah Watson, Head of Commissioning, Virtual Reality, says: “Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel is a fascinating account of a critical moment in Ireland’s history, told from a unique perspective. It shows that virtual reality can be used to give audiences a greater sense of presence, enabling them to better understand a range of issues like important current affairs, news, science and history.”
To fit alongside the company’ Daydream mobile VR platform, Google is partnering with Lenovo, LG, and YI Technology to create a new class of 180 cameras. Called VR180, the point-and-shoot video cameras create stereoscopic 180 video that can be uploaded or livestreamed to YouTube, and viewed on VR headsets.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki took the stage at Vidcon 2017 to announce that the Google-owned company would immediately support 180 video, or what YouTube calls VR180, and is bringing an eponymous class of VR cameras to market. In a YouTube blogpost, the company says VR180 video can be viewed on Cardboard, Daydream, and PSVR headsets.
image captured by Road to VR
While individual VR180 cameras are still under wraps, the company says the point-and-shoot cameras are due out sometime this winter. As for price, Wojcicki says these cameras will be comparatively cheaper to 360 cameras, revealing that VR180 cameras “are just a couple hundred [dollars].”
Google is also opening up a certification program so other manufacturers can create VR180 cameras—starting with Z CAM.
image courtesy Google
YouTube has released a playlist on its official Virtual Reality Channel showing a number of its content partners using what we would presume is some version of the supported 180 camera. Unlike 360 video, which first saw support on the video sharing platform back in 2015, VR180 video is missing the ability to change your point of view (POV) when viewed on traditional monitors. Since these videos are also displayed as 16:9 videos on traditional monitors, a YouTuber could hypothetically shoot video exclusively in VR180 to garner a greater crossover of VR and non-VR viewership on a single video.
It’s uncertain if the videos below were captured with official VR180 hardware, or a test rig that provided similar performance. Notice the videos are delivered at up to 4K resolution at 30 FPS on both traditional monitors and in the VR-accessible YouTube app. Find out how to watch a VR video on your smartphone here by using the stock YouTube app.
180 degree stereoscopic video has been around in VR for a while now, with companies like NextVR broadcasting their sports coverage almost exclusively in 3D 180. This is because it allows you to deliver video with better resolution than a 3D 360 video, but at lesser or equal file size—something that’s important when you’re streaming to headsets. When the action is mostly forward-facing, the back register of a 360 video tends not to be used anyway, making 3D 180 a smarter choice for specific purposes.
The 360 film industry is still young and it’s maturing rapidly. With his name on more than 20 360 film projects to date, Armando Kirwin has had an inside view as to where things started, where they’re going, and why.
Guest Article by Armando Kirwin
Armando Kirwin has worked as a Director of VR, VR Producer, Executive Producer, and Head of Post Production for several leading VR companies, including Here Be Dragons (formerly known as Vrse.works) and Facebook. He was also the cofounder of Milk(vr). He has helped create 22+ VR projects to date. These projects have earned four Emmy nominations, the Grand Prix at Cannes, and numerous debuts at Tribeca, SXSW, and Sundance.
Over the past three years, the primary customer of 360 film has been big brands. I’ve helped create many different 360 film projects at several different companies so my understanding of the amount of money a brand is willing to spend is very much based on real-world experience. A single piece of content (5 to 10 minutes in length) used to cost $350,000 to $500,000, with the occasional big budget project hitting $1 million to 3 million.
As near-term headset growth has underwhelmed and the hype has begun to wear off, a lot of the initial brands that were interested in experimenting with VR have had their go — in fact, if you look closely you will see very few repeat customers. Meanwhile other brands have not stepped in as quickly. With no meaningful increase in viewership to justify additional marketing expenditures, this source of customers isn’t growing fast enough.
Alongside the brands, tech companies have ponied up to fund the creation of content. Instead of simply investing in a slate of key pieces to kickstart the industry, what we have today is a welfare state in which a handful of deep-pocketed tech giants are keeping the 360 film industry afloat. Despite the hype, they are not exactly excited to be in this position.
On location with the Facebook Surround 360 camera. Tech companies remain as one of the biggest clients of cinematic VR. | Photo courtesy Armando Kirwin
A few major Hollywood players have earmarked a percentage of their ample marketing spend to keep things interesting, but that money is very difficult for many would-be creators to gain access to.
Making Money When Consumers Expect Free Content
Services like YouTube have long since taught me that short-form video should be free. It’s therefore not surprising that all early (paid) VR app store success stories to date have been VR game experiences, while even some of the best 360 film content is offered for free.
What about VR games? VR games have numerous advantages over 360 film, but perhaps the most important — and one that is often overlooked — is that consumers are much more comfortable buying games via app stores than they are buying individual pieces of short-form video content. Personally, I’m totally willing to spend $3 on a popular iPhone game, but services like YouTube have long since taught me that short-form video should be free. It’s therefore not surprising that all early (paid) VR app store success stories to date have been VR game experiences, while even some of the best 360 film content is offered for free.
Let that sink in. This means that on mobile, games are not currently the activity people are spending most of their time in. If you accept that VR is a computing paradigm, then it makes sense that gaming would only be a small portion of it, but we definitely did not know that was the case three years ago.But herein lies the problem, Samsung and Google have stated that mobile headset owners are spending nearly 50% of their time in headset watching video content and it may be growing. I’ve been told behind closed doors that gaming on mobile headsets is probably closer to 35% of usage today.
What are the immediate ramifications of this fact? What’s happening is that the mobile VR industry is only positioned to properly monetize the gaming portion of the market, despite it being the smaller part.
Divide and Be Conquered
What’s imperative, especially now that we have a massive workforce ready to deploy, is that we figure out how to properly monetize 360 film content. Inexplicably, the industry’s current approach to this appears to be “walled garden” video apps that compete with each other to fill their tiny buckets from an already limited supply of content.
I believe this approach was a mistake for the industry. Any startup that attempted to lock away videos within an app hasn’t been capable of converting their users into anything worthwhile, nor will they be able to do so for a long time. This is primarily because the total number of potential viewers was already so small that the number of viewers within a specific app turned out to be miniscule.
The situation is especially dire because these apps mostly exist from a time when they were the only place to watch 360 film content, but as YouTube and Facebook have caught up, it now makes little sense for brands (who are the only people paying for this content) to use those other apps, and thereby severely limit the number of view that content inside of those apps will receive. Not surprisingly, just like the output of integrated studios, the rate of new content releases within these apps has slowed over the last year — which in turn means even fewer active users.
Without a pre-existing catalog of content to license (as standard content streaming apps have the luxury of today), these apps are like TV stations that only air one new episode each month. On a long enough timeframe, some of these apps may grow up to be interesting, but in the meantime they are sitting ducks waiting for better positioned companies to come in and create their own ‘TV channels.’
In fact, most established publishers are opting to do just that. New York Times VR, Time/Life/People, Discovery, etc., have all launched their own offerings and, not surprisingly, these video apps are already on the way to larger viewerships than the startups because they’re able to leverage their existing publishing network to drive up the audience size. Side note: this also allows them to help brands swallow the high cost of creating 360 film content since it can now be seen as subcategory within an overall media spend that includes traditional, print, and web.
Finding a Fitting Model
One way forward would be for 360 film startups to create original content (i.e. the Netflix model), but the prohibitively expensive cost would quickly deplete the amount of money any company would reasonably spend doing this. You could shell out $10 million dollars creating 20 short pieces of content, but that’s not rational because it’s not clear if that would create any defensible advantage nor would there be a return-on-investment to convert into more content. Several companies are trying to do this and it’s not working at all.
Meanwhile, Facebook and YouTube aren’t automatically going to create a path to monetization because traditional content creators on those networks make money based on a massive number of viewers and VR is too small for that and will be for several years.
We know that the tech companies driving the VR industry (Google, Samsung, Valve, HTC, Oculus, etc.) are all predisposed to thinking about app stores as the primary means of monetizing content.
In summary, we know that the tech companies driving the VR industry (Google, Samsung, Valve, HTC, Oculus, etc.) are all predisposed to thinking about app stores as the primary means of monetizing content. And that works great for VR games because games are sold direct to consumer — each popular game benefits non-exclusively from the overall size of the growing ecosystem and can make even more money (e.g. from Farmville to Angry Birds to Clash of Clans).
But what we did wrong was assume VR was only about games. Now that we know 360 film is very popular on mobile, we need to figure out how to move away from brands and get consumers to pay for it directly. Ideally we would do this by activating the large workforce that is sitting idly by. However, it will most likely be in the best interest of these new creators to skip the walled gardens and go direct, so current video app startups are likely to still be in trouble. How we do this remains to be seen.
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Up until this point in the this series, I have only discussed 360 film and VR games. That’s because categories outside of entertainment, like productivity apps or social, are so small right now they barely register on the radar. In the next part of this series I will explore why this may always be the case and look at the position 360 film occupies within the greater VR ecosystem.
Disclosure: Armando has worked with Facebook on a contract basis to produce 360 film content. Facebook was also a client of Milk(vr). The New York Times was a client of Vrse.works where Armando worked on a variety of projects in various capacities including Post Producer, Producer, and Executive Producer and Head of Post Production. The New York Times was also a client of Milk(vr) where Armando was Director of VR. Armando had access to a pre-production Yi HALO camera for an unreleased project, but was not compensated by Google. Armando also had access to a prototype Zcam MFT camera, but was not compensated by Zcam.
The 360 film industry is still young and it’s maturing rapidly. With his name on more than 22 360 film projects to date, Armando Kirwin has had an inside view as to where things started, where they’re going, and why.
Guest Article by Armando Kirwin
Armando Kirwin has worked as a Director of VR, VR Producer, Executive Producer, and Head of Post Production for several leading VR companies, including Here Be Dragons (formerly known as Vrse.works) and Facebook. He was also the cofounder of Milk(vr). He has helped create 22+ VR projects to date. These projects have earned four Emmy nominations, the Grand Prix at Cannes, and numerous debuts at Tribeca, SXSW, and Sundance.
In my last article I explained how 360 film production technology has gone from proprietary systems held by a few well-funded companies to now being accessible by basically anyone. Traditional production technology experienced a similar transformation, but whereas it took many decades for that to happen in Hollywood, it looks like it will only take 360 film another year or two for the major production technologies to be well democratized.
A Level(ed) Playing Field
Rather obviously, this has leveled the playing field and the number of companies and individuals making 360 film content has increased dramatically. Back when I started it felt like there were five production companies. A mere three years later it feels like there are five hundred — and because of improved technology they are all theoretically capable of creating equal quality work.
This has caused big changes.
The large integrated 360 film studios that were fundamental in early stages of the industry are now facing difficulties. In fact, the number of projects produced by these well-known studios is clearly going down. This is for many reasons.
An Exception, Only for a Short While
First, these early pioneers were not functioning in the same efficient way as is the norm in the production industry at large. Typical production companies maintain a very small overhead and then scale up with freelance labor only as needed per-project. This is how all production works, including the commercial, TV, and feature film industries. In none of those places will you find editors, cinematographers, technicians, etc. sitting inside a company day-to-day on payroll.
Photo courtesy Armando Kirwin
Yet, because the early days of cinematic VR were messy and proprietary, integrated studios with lots of people on salary made sense. The rapid advancement of technology has eliminated that need, and now integrated studios are facing a world of hurt because they have large overhead costs to cover.
And it’s a double whammy because the lower barrier to entry means integrated studios have hordes of competitors springing up who can now produce work of equal quality at drastically reduced startup costs. Unfortunately, all of the early money that was spent by integrated studios means little today aside from brand recognition.
New, But Not Immune to Industry Trends
Second, agencies and publishers — two major sources of clientele — have steadily been moving traditional production and creative services in-house for years. Because 360 film production technology became accessible so rapidly, these potential clients have inevitably taken 360 film production in house too. I’ve seen several of the industry’s biggest clients who were reliably awarding millions of dollars in contracts two years ago transition completely to in-house models of production.
Third, traditional production companies that were once hesitant to expend the capital necessary to enter the 360 film industry, or that were afraid of complex technology, suddenly have less to worry about and have entered the market in droves. All over the world you see job openings at pre-existing companies looking to hire one single person to oversee all of their 360 film activities. And these traditional companies have the advantage of stable revenue from their current business to keep the lights on. It’s now almost impossible to argue that starting a new VR company makes more sense than starting a 360 film division within an existing solvent company.
Supply & Demand of 360 Film Knowledge
Lastly, the number of 360 film freelancers is growing rapidly while simultaneously becoming less valuable. It seems like I see a new online class or workshop every single day. Yet the technical skills needed to make 360 film content are becoming rapidly commoditized by improved technology and the spread of knowledge. When we made Great Performers: L.A.Noir, a big-budget production with over 50 crew members, there were only two people on set with more than six months of prior 360 film experience. This is very different from the number of specialists required a few years ago.
BTS shot of ‘Great Performers L.A. Noir’ by Alex Jaras. Available on NYTVR | Photo courtesy Armando Kirwin
Not only do you need fewer specialists, but traditional production crew members are now more easily able to add 360 film skills to their already-valuable toolbox. Meanwhile, crew members over-specialized in 360 production— especially those who enjoyed a temporary utility, but did not have a previous value in the marketplace — are becoming obsolete.
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Similar to the lesson we learned about technology in part one of this series, what we did wrong as an industry was ignore the obvious fact that 360 film production would inevitably come to resemble all other forms of production.
I’ve heard various companies and individuals refer to this period of time as “the winter of VR” or the “bursting of the VR hype bubble,” but the truth is that, although it’s more difficult for any one person or company, it’s actually better for the industry overall to have as many content creators as possible.
The actual limiting factor is that the number of customers is not growing fast enough. In other words, what’s missing is an outlet for this burgeoning workforce.
I will discuss that in part three and also explore the difference between 360 film and VR games in greater detail.
Disclosure: Armando worked with Facebook as a freelance Executive Producer and Head of Post Production, and as a contracted VR Producer. Facebook was also a client of Milk(vr). The New York Times was a client of both Vrse.works and Milk(vr) where Armando worked on a variety of projects in various capacities including Post Producer, Head of Post Production, Executive Producer, and Cofounder. Armando had access to a pre-production Yi HALO for an unreleased project, but was not compensated by Google. Armando also had access to a prototype Zcam MFT camera, but was not compensated by Zcam.
