As we mentioned when reporting on the big news about Nokia and Sony’s partnership, 360-degree video is a very accessible bridge to immersive content and, by extension, virtual reality. 360-degree video can be viewed on almost any device and works really well with smartphones, a common accessory for most.
Social engagement is a smart way to increase interest in just about anything, which is exactly what the Pie application on iOS is doing. Announced via press release, Pie raised seed funding from McClatchy, Colopl VR Fund, Sparkland Capital, Stage Venture Partners, Graph Ventures, Matter Ventures, and others and they’ve officially launched the application.
360-degree recording typically requires a good bit of equipment to make content, but Pie and powerful smartphones with certain accessories help to streamline the process a bit.
If you have or purchase 360-camera attachments like the Insta360 Nano, you can use your iPhone to capture, edit, and share 10-second video clips. If you have a consumer camera like the Ricoh Theta S or Nikon Keymission 360 you can still upload the video to Pie via your iPhone. If you don’t have either of these peripherals, you’re not left out of the experience entirely.
Though not true 360-degree video, Pie’s “Slice” feature allows you to record a video that will move forward or backward depending on a user swiping across their screen or spinning around.
VR and 360-degree videos are not exactly synonymous, a fact mentioned by Pie Co-Founder Ceci Mourkogiannis when speaking on the new developments. “We are excited about the long-term possibilities of VR as it relates to 360 video,” she says. “But today we want to serve the 2 billion people who already own smartphones and give them a way to create and watch 360 videos that fits into their everyday lives.”
Despite that fact, VR headsets are certainly the best means to immerse one’s self into a 360-degree video. Nevertheless, this new social and easy to use program, along with tools like it, will be instrumental in growing the popularity of 360 media. You can download the Pie application for iOS here.
If you’ve spent any time following the VR Space chances are you’ve heard that phrase more than once. As immersive and interesting as 360 videos can be, there are those that refuse to accept them as “true” VR due to their lack of interactive elements. 360 camera technology is improving all the time, but the content itself needs to improve as well if the medium wants to silence its critics within the industry. Fortunately for this emerging genre, however, a group of young San Francisco innovators setting out to make 360 videos cooler, more engaging, and, dare I say it, fun.
The SOAP Collective consists of three young entrepreneurs: Logan Dwight, Ian Hirschfield, and Jaurreau Bowen (pictured above from left to right). This team may be small, but they have a very large goal: change the way people think about 360 videos and immersive media in general.
Looking at the SOAP Trio you probably wouldn’t peg them as a group of dedicated computer programmers and audio visual geeks. The traditional coder stereotype of stained clothes, messy hair and ill-fitting garments doesn’t apply to this group of tattoo-clad, stylishly dressed millenials. The SOAP boys are, for lack of a better word, cool. And they are trying to bring that same attitude to the somewhat-stagnant world of 360 video production.
“We’ve been deeply involved in technology and media since we were kids,” Dwight writes, “[I] designed and developed my first video game when I was 9 years old. Ian has been coding websites and making movies since junior high. We’re part of the generation that grew up with the Internet, and that has given us a unique set of creative skills and tastes. We know we’re not alone either. Our creativity sits at the axis of design, illustration, animation, interaction, and code. We call this skillset “The New Creative”.
For the SOAP collective, Achieving this New Creative is the key to unlocking better immersive content. The problem, however, is that most companies — even those in creative capitals like Silicon Valley, LA and New York — fail to adequately understand the power of their employees and the roles that they fill.
We’ve felt that there hasn’t yet been a definitive industry model built around The New Creative,” Dwight writes. “Often people are silo’d into jobs that utilize one or two skills. They are meant to focus down on a limited set of tasks. There are more cases of multi-skill jobs in the startup world, but they often come paired with extremely long hours and a lack of career stability. We wanted to build a company that embraced being a ‘creative swiss-army knife’. To solve this, we wanted cover 2 major things: Ownership and Lifestyle.”
The idea of ownership for SOAP is that, “every person, no matter their job, is some form of creative. Sales, HR, Accounting, etc. are all creative in their own ways…We are dedicated to creating a sense of ‘I built this’ in every project a person works on.”
On the other side of the coin, Lifestyle is, “the idea that your work should allow you to live the way you want to live. Your work should feel like a natural part of who you are, but it should not own and define your whole life.”
By putting an emphasis on creativity and the personal empowerment of each and every employee, SOAP is hoping to transform even the most basic immersive project into a memorable, artistic experience. On of their main series, VR Love Letters, is attempting to bring emotion and intimacy to a medium that is typically used to tell broad stories.
The SOAP Collective has so far done mostly private work for banks and other types of businesses, but their goal is to push their envelope even fuller as 2017 gets closer.
“The most current news for us is that we’re expanding our studio’s focus to push strongly into room-scale 3D VR. Following a year of strong development in the 360 video space, we’ve always planned to move the business into full VR on platforms such as Rift, Vive, PSVR. Our team has a background in video game and software development, so in many ways this is a homecoming for us,” Dwight writes.
The studio describes this mystery project as being, “Not quite a video game, but not passive VR cinema either. Our goal as a studio is to find the ideal storytelling niche for VR, to create interactive virtual worlds that everyone can enjoy.”
SOAP will also continue to make and innovate 360 videos in their search for the New Creative. Whether or not you believe 360 videos is VR, these young men are determined to convince you that they are art.
Disclaimer: The SOAP Collective is currently working out of an office in The Upload Collective co-working office, which they pay for. The Upload Collective and UploadVR are separated entities under the Upload umbrella to avoid conflicts of interest. This story was written solely on the merits of this interesting studio, and has not been sponsored in any way by SOAP.
Various publications, print or non-print, have learned that 360-degree video is a beneficial platform that brings a new flavor to reporting. Smartphones and the internet have forced journalism to evolve in various ways and VR is inspiring major players to innovate once again. This time around, The New York Times has jumped onto the VR hype train with their own 360-degree news production similar to USA Today’s VRtually There and the Huffington Post show on Hulu. With the tag line “To understand the world, see it from every angle” and a declaration to bring a new video every weekday, NYT presents The Daily 360.
The very first video, “Introducing The Daily 360”, shows a collection of visuals from cliff diving to both front-running candidates in the current American political race. The New York Times has equipped their journalists for 360-degree recording worldwide and the video strikes a balance between joyful events and harder hitting journalism as they show us a few things that are in store. The video that starts off Daily 360 coverage officially is of the latter persuasion, taking place in the aftermath of an area where people were killed. During a funeral at a reception hall in Sana, Yemen, a Saudi-led strike brutally killed over 100 people and Saudi representatives say that the tragedy was due to “false information”.
More often than not, those viewing the news see things while remaining fairly detached from what’s happening. Watching 360-degree videos in VR takes a couple steps toward making events hit home, especially scenes like the aftermath of the airstrike in Yemen. It’s not known just yet if all the videos will be shorter features like this (comes in at one minute and 10 seconds), but it’s going to be interesting to see where Daily 360 goes from here. You can view the videos on the NYTimes website or on YouTube.
The supernatural VR series Invisible from Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow, launched a week ago on Samsung VR, but now you can access the 5-part series across any device via Jaunt.
The series is a first-of-its-kind scripted 360-degree video project about a powerful family with an intriguing secret — an invisibility gene. The episodes are going to be far more immersive in a VR headset, so if you want to check out the series it might be better in VR via the Jaunt app on Cardboard, Steam or Oculus compared to seeing it via a 2D website. That said, you could stream the first episode right from UploadVR. I embedded it below and all the episodes are at the Jaunt link above or inside the app on different platforms linked above.
The episodic approach to the scripted 360-degree project is a notable one, breaking up the overall story into roughly 5-7 minute segments and employing a number of editing techniques to cut between different locations and shots. To underscore the cutting-edge nature of the effort, creators were unable to examine captured footage live on set in a headset, so putting it together was more like the pre-digital days of filmmaking when footage needed to be developed first. In this case, the multiple cameras on the 360-degree camera rig had to be stitched. With the script, they described the whole room in addition to the actions and lines of the characters, which is one of the reasons it turned into a 40-page document.
Left to right in foreground directors Jerome Sable, Doug Liman and Julina Tatlock shooting Invisible.
“We had to create our own script writing format,” said Liman, in an interview with UploadVR. “I think when people watch Invisible, they’ll see how far you can push scripted VR, and how many of the rules that existed before us don’t really apply anymore.”
The project is created by 30 Ninjas, a digital entertainment company co-founded by Liman and Julina Tatlock, who executive-produced Invisible. Visual effects were added by The Molecule and the project was supported by Jaunt, Samsung and Condé Nast, with a sponsorship for Lexus tagged at the end of each video.
“It’s going to be hugely important for us at 30 Ninjas that people find this entertaining,” Tatlock said. “We want to tell popular stories.”
The creators are looking to see what people have to say about the project and, with Jaunt’s heatmap analytics, they may soon see data that shows them whether the many cutting and editing techniques employed throughout the series kept audience attention as intended.
“We’re looking to additional seasons of Invisible,” Liman said about the future. “Our skill level at the end of season one is way beyond what it was at the beginning of season one.”
Have you checked out Invisible yet? What did you think?
It’s a well-known issue that communicating what it feels like to see and play a game in VR using a traditional, flat, 2D screen is nearly impossible. Utilizing mixed reality helps — it lets people see the player inside the game world and provides a better representation of what it’s like — but nothing beats actually experiencing it inside an HMD itself. Luckily, that’s where 360-video helps bridge the gap.
Whether or not you think 360 video is VR or not, it’s undeniably more immersive than a flat video. That’s why Vertigo Games, the developer behind the zombie-killing fest Arizona Sunshine, opted to release a 360 ‘Apocalypse’ trailer for the upcoming action game. You can watch that embedded below.
We’ve seen 360 trailers for VR games before, but not nearly enough of them. Ideally, we think they should be the new standard for demonstrating a VR game. HTC, Valve, and Oculus should allow developers to display 360 trailers directly in the storefronts on Viveport, Steam, Oculus Home, respectively. Let players view them inside their Vive, Rift, or Gear VR without going to another app or downloading something. That small step would lend tremendous help towards communicating what it’s like to play certain VR games.
This particular trailer is just a slo-mo look at a scene where zombies are attacking a road full of vehicles — it’s nothing groundbreaking — but it’s several magnitudes more intense than just a normal game trailer when watched inside a VR headset.
When we played Arizona Sunshine last, we came away very impressed. While it’s just a zombie wave shooter at its core, you’re able to move around the environment using different hotspot waypoints and there is full cooperative multiplayer and singleplayer game modes.
The game is scheduled for a release this year in 2016, leaving just about two months before that window closes. When it does come out, it’s currently slated for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.
Today, Oculus is announcing that the groundbreaking virtual reality short film, Lost, is coming to the Samsung Gear VR. Lost originally premiered for the Oculus Rift and was clearly designed with the unique capabilities and limitations of that system in mind. For its debut on the less-powerful Gear VR headset, the project has been repurposed as a 360 video rather than a full, PC-powered, VR experience that allows for robust features like positional tracking.
According to an email from Oculus,
Lost 360, from Oculus Story Studio, is now available on the Oculus Store. This short film brings you along an unexpected encounter in a magical forest. From the director of Pixar’s The Blue Umbrella, Lost 360 is an excellent showcase of narrative storytelling in virtual reality. Lost 360 will be free on the Oculus Store.
Minor Spoilers ahead here: Lost is the story of a massive robot stranded in the woods that is missing one giant hand. The narrative focuses mostly on the hand itself as it wanders into a forest clearing in search of its master. You yourself are also occupying that same clearing and you become a subject of interest for both the hand and its gargantuan host.
Lost was the first creation of Oculus Story studios who would later go on to make the Emmy Award winning short VR film Henry. As such it was designed to introduce a user to VR films in general. The film therefore plays with your gaze and sense of depth quite a bit.
Despite the loss of positional tracking as it moves to the Gear VR, Lost 360 should be able to maintain most of the original’s key moments. The Gear is still capable of rendering depth and enabling head tracking. Those two features are really all one needs to enjoy this experience.
You can download Lost 360 on the Oculus Store starting today for free.
As virtual reality grows, visual experiences tailored toward the technology’s unique level of immersion become more and more commonplace. 360-degree videos are being used for product promotion, education, live events, and more in an effort to give a more involved perspective compared to our usual rectangular videos. Today, Samsung has announced a full-fledged drama series coming exclusively to Samsung VR before its wide release on other platforms.
The 6-part miniseries is directed by Doug Liman, the director behind the Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Edge of Tomorrow. Many virtual narrative experiences are delivered in small samplings, with popular films like Suicide Squad, The Jungle Book, Pete’s Dragon, and The Conjuring 2 all having brief VR interactions on the Samsung VR platform to promote the full 2D films. Invisible, though, will be a high production show asking viewers to stay for a full feature. Thankfully, the supernatural premise seems interesting enough to stick around for:
Invisible tells the story of an old New York family, the Ashlands, whose tentacles reach into the largest corporations and governments in the world. Although they control a large portion of the world’s economy they exist in relative ambiguity. They move without being seen and somehow without being known. That’s because select family members have the power to make themselves invisible. The cause of their invisibility remained a mystery, until now. Groundbreaking genetic research is about to break the code and expose their secret.
Invisible is available today on Samsung VR and will be available on Jaunt VR on October 27th. The show stars Sofia Black-D’elia, Olivia Boreham-Wing, Michael Siberry, Austin Caudwell and Lewis Cancelmi and is produced by Julina Tatlock, who previously produced the tv show “Who Cares About Girls?”. The show’s writer, Melisa Wallack, is known for the film Dallas Buyers Club which featured Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner.
USA Today revealed that they have taken to the skies in the debut episode of their virtual reality news show, VRtually There. The new show is the product of a collaboration between USA Today’s parent company Gannett and YouTube, whom will have the rights to stream the show exclusively for the first 60 days of each episode.
Each affair aims to have 3 unique adventures that take full advantage of the VR medium and the premiere will easily give viewers a case of vertigo with its collection of high-flying adventures. First up, viewers get a look at an F/A -18 Hornet fighter jet and its home aircraft carrier.
The debut episode first gives information on the Hornet’s performance and even gives a close-up look at a launch. Second, we take a brief look at some fearless daredevils. Highliners are people that travel mountain to mountain via tightrope walking and VRtually gets a first-person view from those conquering their fears over the 100+ ft drops. The Highliners share their individual feelings on the extreme sport while also touching on the science of the gear they use regularly. Lastly, we’re transported to a slightly more calm event at the world’s largest hot-air balloon festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This show is one of a few, similar to Hulu’s news show currently in production, and execs from USA Today and Gannett have high hopes for the future of the platform.“Our in-house VR content production is unique to the industry, allows us to showcase our great journalism across the network and allows us to expose our vast audience to this innovative storytelling,” said Joanne Lipman, CCO of USA Today Network. Kevin Gentzel of Gannet follows up fittingly, “This is the time to build the audience, get them used to the medium and what’s possible.”
VRtually There can be viewed on USA Today’s mobile app on Android or IOS or on YouTube via your desktop browser or mobile VR devices.
Though VR is really only just now taking a firm hold in its various markets, virtual reality has been a concept flirted with for many years in our favorite science fiction books, movies, and television series. Rishi Kaneria, a filmmaker and video essayist, has taken to the 360-degree video format to create a visual essay on VR in the film industry. From classic films such as Total Recall to the Matrix trilogy, Kaneria takes us on a journey through more than 40 years of filmmaking:
World on a Wire (1973)
Tron (1982)
Brainstorm (1983)
Total Recall (1990)
The Lawnmower Man (1992)
Mindwarp (1992)
Disclosure (1994)
Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Virtuosity (1995)
Hackers (1995)
Strange Days (1995)
Lawnmower Man 2 (1996)
Nirvana (1997)
Darkdrive (1998)
eXistenZ (1999)
The Matrix Trilogy (1999-2003)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
Avalon (2001)
Surrogates (2009)
Inception (2010)
Tron Legacy (2010)
Source Code (2011)
Total Recall (2012)
The Congress (2013)
In the 360-degree video, each film pops up in chronological order with a large collection of scenes from each film dispersed around you. Many of the films take a direct approach to virtual reality, placing their protagonists under a headset of some kind. Others, like Inception’s journey into the world of dreams, have a more abstract approach but they all thrive off the essence of virtual spaces.
In the near future, we’ll have a few more films to add to this collection. Ready Player One, a popular 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, has a film adaptation on the way directed by the one and only Steven Spielberg. The science fiction story features a virtual universe called OASIS that players access with goggles and haptic gloves. Also, later this year we will also see a film adaptation of the Assassin’s Creed game franchise. The film’s plot involves a company that has developed a means, called the Animus Project, to virtually dive into the memories of a person’s ancestors. The first film will be diving into the Spanish Inquisition, is directed by Justin Kurzel, and features Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Irons.
Today, the majority of people try VR for the first time on a Samsung Gear or Google Cardboard and, more than likely, they watch a 360-degree video. That’s a shame really, because most 360 video experiences are terrible, especially when streamed over the Internet. I’m not referring to the content, per se (although there is A LOT of bad 360 video content), but the viewing experience itself. 360 videos are blurry, the files take forever to download and they lack motion parallax – which might cause motion sickness if you move too much.
The motion parallax issue won’t be solved until light field technology improves significantly (hurry up, Lytro). But resolution and streaming enhancements are definitely something we can tackle right away. To fully realize the resolution of today’s HMDs, a VR video needs 8K of total resolution, which results in 100% coverage of the ~1200×1200 ocular resolution per eye and yields a pleasant experience. The standard 360 video today is often delivered as only 4K resolution video, of which only 20% or so is seen at any given time within the Field-of-View of the HMD. If we tried to simply stream at 8K resolution, we would run into bandwidth issues and most HMDs would choke or blow-up (eg: they can’t play a 8K video). Also, a 3-minute 360 video at 8K resolution can be a whopping 1gb+ in size.
So, how do you stream high resolution content (8K) with low bandwidth thresholds? The answer is Field of View Adaptive Streaming (FOVAS): stream just what the user is looking at in high-res and the rest of the scene in low-res, saving bandwidth while maintaining optimal user experience. Both Facebook and a startup called Pixvana are using the approach to deliver VR videos that look great.
FOVAS is a core component of the new Steam 360 Video Player, debuting in early 2017. A partnership between Valve, Pixvana and Akamai, Steam 360 Video will allow VR filmmakers to publish their content to the Steam store. Utilizing Pixvana’s FOVAS player technology, along with Akamai’s CDN capabilities, Steam 360 Video will offer high-quality VR streaming to global audiences.
It looks like we will have to wait until early 2017 to see the full Steam 360 Video Player. However, I did have the chance to check out Pixvana’s FOVAS technology in-action on their new SPIN Player demo, for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. (If you have a Vive or Rift you can try it yourself, here.)
The SPIN Player demo consists of several 360 videos. Before each 360 video starts, the type of camera and resolution of the video appear on the screen. The videos vary in resolution from 8K-10K and were shot with a variety of camera systems. As you turn your head in the environment, you can see the FOVAS algorithms at work. Wherever you look, the image gets sharper almost immediately (typically within 100-400ms). If you moved your head slowly, you probably wouldn’t even notice that the image is updating in real time.
The monoscopic videos I saw in the Pixvana SPIN Player were crisper than anything I’ve seen for streaming 360 video. The bandwidth savings were equally impressive – “The SPIN Player can stream 8K and 10K video at just 3 mb/s”, says Sarah Stumbo, a VR Software Engineer at Pixvana.
8K+ resolution does not solve all the issues with 360 video though. If the subject of the shot was more than eight feet away from the camera, their effective angular resolution can make things soft and seem out of focus. 360 video has a long way to go before we are walking around inside of movies and reliving experiences in a hyper-realistic way – but this is a much needed step in the right direction.
