David Attenborough – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

November 24, 2021

David Attenborough’s First Life Documentary Available In Oculus TV Now

Another David Attenborough documentary, First Life, is coming to Oculus TV, focusing on the origin of life on Earth.

It was only a few days ago that we found out that David Attenborough’s 3D documentary Kingdom of Plants was making its way to Oculus TV, and yet another documentary is now available too. First Life was first broadcast in 2010 and has now been reimagined for VR over a decade later, co-produced by Meta and Alchemy Immersive with Zoo VFX and 1.618 Digital.

The documentary runs for just over 11 minutes and will explore the very beginnings of life on our planet, featuring a variety of creatures such as the Opabinai, the Anomalocaris and the Hallucigenia. Here’s a snippet from Alchemy Immersive on what to expect:

Join David Attenborough on an epic journey 350 billion years into the past to experience the origin of life on Earth. Utilising world-leading paleontological research and breakthroughs in CGI technologies, experience for the first time the story of how life evolved from single-celled organisms into the ferocious predators that stalked the seafloor.

Alchemy Immersive also brought the aforementioned Kingdom of Plants documentary to life in VR, but that was a little different to First Life — whereas the former was filmed in 3D, the latter was not.

Nonetheless, First Life will present on Oculus TV in stereoscopic 8K 60fps video, available now on Quest headsets. Headphones are recommend as well, as the experience uses spatial audio.

You can start the experience by visiting this link on desktop or mobile, which allows you to queue the experience in VR or bookmark it for later.

November 22, 2021

David Attenborough’s Kingdom Of Plants Comes To Quest Via Oculus TV

A flora-focused series from nature documentary legend David Attenborough is making its way to VR, available now via Oculus TV.

Kingdom of Plants 3D is a three-part series, written and presented by Attenborough, that first premiered on TV back in 2012, broadcast on 3D channels.

It was one of a couple of Attenborough series in the early 2010s that were shot and presented in 3D format. Kingdom of Plants is the only one to since be converted to work in VR and made available to Quest users.

The VR adaption was produced by Alchemy Immersive — who also worked on last year’s release of the Micro Monsters series by Attenborough on Oculus TV — in collaboration with Meta, ZOO VFX and 1.618 Digital.

Kingdom of Plants will be available at 8K 60fps on Quest 2 and 5K 60fps on the original Quest.

“This immersive series gives you a chance to discover how the life of plants is far from static; it’s full of rich and curious stories of rivalries, dramas, allies and enemies,” said Alchemy Immersive director Iona McEwan to Variety. “By immersing you in the plant world at their scale, in their time, and in incredible 8K quality, you experience our world in an entirely new way.”

Speaking about the original film, Attenborough said that “you can go to Africa and watch elephants and you’ll see more or less what you see on TV but you can’t go anywhere in the world and see plants like you can in this series.”

Quest users can access the content right now through Oculus TV or by heading to alchemyimmersive.com/kingdomofplants.

October 5, 2020

New 5-Part David Attenborough Series Coming To Oculus Quest On October 6

A new 5-part nature series starring David Attenborough is coming to Oculus Quest from October 6, co-produced by Oculus and Alchemy Immersive.

The series, split across five episodes, is called Micro Monsters with David Attenborough and will be available through Oculus TV starting tomorrow. On Quest 2, the series will stream in 8K 3D in 60fps, whereas on the original Quest it will come down to 5K.

As the title suggests, the series will focus on some of nature’s smaller creatures, specifically arthropods such as butterflies, scorpions and the like. While filming, the series used a combination of custom-developed 3D stereoscopic camera rigs, 180 degree footage and VFX compositing to create the final product, created specifically for VR.

Here’s a summary of what to expect:

“Witness a scorpion and a centipede fight to the death; experience the process of an aphid miraculously cloning itself; and an army of green ants building incredible structures. Narrowly avoid the deadly ambush of a Trapdoor spider and become transfixed by the Portia spider’s deadly musical lullaby. Combining spectacular live-action close-ups with the power of computer graphics, watch a caterpillar’s transformation from inside its cocoon and discover a beetle’s secret chemical weapon.”

Here are some more details on each episode as well:

Episode 1 – The Duel at Dawn: Dive into the deadly world of scorpions, as they battle for their pray and a mate.

Episode 2 – The Mighty Makers: Discover the natural world’s ultimate colonizers: ants and aphids.

Episode 3 – The Trap Door: Uncover the secret forms of defense and attack of the Trap Door spider and the Bombardier beetle.

Episode 4 – The Feast and Flight: Discover the miraculous shapeshifting bug that starts life as one creature and ends it as a completely different one.

Episode 5 – The Deadly Lullaby: Join the hypnotic Portia Spider as she prepares her attack on a spider twice her size.

Micro Monsters is available on Oculus Quest from October 6.

October 5, 2020

New 5-Part David Attenborough Series Coming To Oculus Quest On October 6

A new 5-part nature series starring David Attenborough is coming to Oculus Quest from October 6, co-produced by Oculus and Alchemy Immersive.

Here’s a summary of what to expect:

“Witness a scorpion and a centipede fight to the death; experience the process of an aphid miraculously cloning itself; and an army of green ants building incredible structures. Narrowly avoid the deadly ambush of a Trapdoor spider and become transfixed by the Portia spider’s deadly musical lullaby. Combining spectacular live-action close-ups with the power of computer graphics, watch a caterpillar’s transformation from inside its cocoon and discover a beetle’s secret chemical weapon.”

Here are some more details on each episode as well:

Episode 1 – The Duel at Dawn: Dive into the deadly world of scorpions, as they battle for their pray and a mate.

Episode 2 – The Mighty Makers: Discover the natural world’s ultimate colonizers: ants and aphids.

Episode 3 – The Trap Door: Uncover the secret forms of defense and attack of the Trap Door spider and the Bombardier beetle.

Episode 4 – The Feast and Flight: Discover the miraculous shapeshifting bug that starts life as one creature and ends it as a completely different one.

Episode 5 – The Deadly Lullaby: Join the hypnotic Portia Spider as she prepares her attack on a spider twice her size.

Micro Monsters is available on Oculus Quest from October 6.

November 3, 2018

David Attenborough’s VR Experience ‘Hold the World’ Lands on Rift

Hold the World (2018) is an educational VR experience from Sky that lets you come face-to-face with Sir David Attenborough, the English broadcaster and world’s foremost naturalist, as he teaches you about a number of species going as far back as the Trilobite and as recent as the flea.

The interactive experience takes you to London’s Natural History Museum, and puts you in reach of a few rare specimens from its world-famous collection, letting you handle and resize the objects while Attenborough teaches you important facts about how the animals must have lived, ate, breathed, and more.

Attenborough is presented to the user by way of high-quality volumetric video capture, and he takes you behind the scenes to a few areas out-of-bounds to the general public. Like the items themselves, the environments have been captured using photogrammetry, allowing you to truly feel like you’re in iconic museum’s geology library, fossil lab, and herbarium.

Skeletons and fossilized specimens come to life as well, showing you a true 1:1 scale of how a Pterosaur must have flown, or how a dragon-fly independently controls each of its four wings as it makes its long migratory trips across the world.

At $4, the experience is undoubtedly one the best price to value ratios out there; everything is lovingly reconstructed to maximize for realism, truly making you feel like you’re sitting across the table with the affable and always knowledgeable Sir David Attenborough. It took me about an hour to complete, going through every animal presented in the experience and taking the few quick quizzes to go along with it. It’s truly something that could be made into a larger series, as I found sitting across from Attenborough and learning with the object in hand to be a really effective way of absorbing the information.

Go One-on-One with David Attenborough in ‘Hold the World’ VR Museum Experience This Spring

Hold the World, an upcoming VR experience from Sky, will let you go face-to-face with Sir David Attenborough, the English broadcaster and world’s foremost naturalist as he explains the finer details of some of the creatures in the world we call home.

The experience, which is slated to arrive on Gear VR, Oculus Rift and Daydream VR sometime this spring, takes you to London’s Natural History Museum and puts you right across the table from Attenborough.

Captured volumetrically by more than 100 cameras, Attenborough acts as your personal guide, explaining the importance of each artefact and object selected from the museum’s collection, including a blue whale, a stegosaurus, a trilobite, a dragonfly, a butterfly and a pterosaur.

There, you’ll be able to pick up rare specimens from the London’s Natural History Museum and take you “behind the scenes to explore areas usually closed to the public,” a Sky blog post states.

Attenborough is no stranger to VR documentaries, as he’s lent his voice to several VR experiences including First Life and VR Dive.

”Sharing my passion for the natural world is something I have done for many years through different technologies, from the days of the black-and-white TV to colour, HD, 3D, 4K and now the virtual reality,” said Attenborough. “Hold the World is an extraordinary next step in how we can communicate and educate people about experiences they wouldn’t usually have access to in the real world. I am delighted about what users can learn and discover from the Natural History Museum’s treasures in this new VR experience – it really is one of the most convincing and bewitching experiences that the world of technology has yet produced.”

Hold The World will be available through the Sky VR app on Google Daydream View, Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift, and will also be temporarily available as a standalone app on Microsoft Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets before it launches on Sky VR for other headsets.

The post Go One-on-One with David Attenborough in ‘Hold the World’ VR Museum Experience This Spring appeared first on Road to VR.

April 20, 2017April 21, 2017

Sir David Attenborough to become 3D hologram for Sky VR documentary

Naturalist to help viewers ‘handle’ objects from Natural History Museum, as broadcaster also unveils new HBO deal

Sir David Attenborough is to be turned into a hologram for a virtual reality tour of the Natural History Museum in London that promises to allow users to “handle” rare fossils from the comfort of their own home.

Sky has commissioned the new experience, called Hold the World, which it says is a marriage of interactive video game technology and TV documentary. The public will be able to take the tour, which offers an up close and personal experience with fossils, bones and skulls, with insights from Attenborough, if they have a VR set, controller and phone app.