The Smithsonian American Art Museum is world renown for having some of the most iconic pieces of art and sculpture anywhere. Not everyone can travel to the US to view the exhibits so Intel has collaborated with Framestore, VALIS Studios, 8i and xRez Studio to recreate the second floor east wing of the museum in virtual reality (VR).
To create the experience an Intel-powered LIDAR scan provided the ground work, which was then combined with photogrammetry provided by 3D specialist Greg Downing (xRez Studio) to build a high level of detail. VALIS Studios’ lead creative director and producer Peter Martin put the team together, with 8i providing the volumetric capture and Framestore provided the Unity build.
Built for room scale VR, the experience allows users to explore the museum using teleportation, where they’ll find three pieces that can be examined far more closely. First is the Adams Memorial, a famous bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. As users draw in close a text overlay appears which details the story of ‘Clover’ Adams, wife of writer Henry Adams, who committed suicide in 1885 by drinking chemicals used to develop photographs. Her grieving husband commissioned the sculptor to create a memorial.
The next takes viewers to Aurora Borealis, the original oil painting created in 1863 by artist Frederic Edwin Church. Approaching the painting reveals the option to teleport into the art piece. It’ll take them to Iceland, where a 360-degree video at 6K resolution of the aurora borealis, provided by designer and photographer Olafur Haraldsson is viewable.
The last piece to explore takes place in a virtual theatre where the 2013 three-channel video installation, Face in the Crowd, plays on three walls. As viewers turn around, they’re are faced with a scan of the artist herself, Alex Prager, who tells them the inspiration for the work.
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Back in September VRFocusreported on the Hawaii Tourism Authority creating a virtual reality (VR) app called Let Hawaii Happen. Conceived by OMD’s Zero Code in collaboration with Hawaii-based agency MVNP and visual effects shop Framestore, the app also used VR marketing platform Immersv. Today Immersv has released the results from the marketing campaign, showcasing how immersive tech is becoming a a viable marketing tool.
The campaign – which could be watched on smartphones using Google Cardboard – was viewed by more than 50,000 unique users in using VR headsets and 360° mobile apps, delivering engagement and conversion rates that Immersv state were far superior to campaigns on traditional mobile or desktop environments.
Running across Immersv’s network of 360° and VR app publishers as pre-roll video ads or opt-in ads, they presented when viewers looked at the “More VR Content” button within an experience. They were then taken to Immersv’s 360° custom room, where the 30-second ad promoting the Let Hawaii Happen app ran on a virtual theater screen. A branded end card appeared at the conclusion of the video, allowing the viewer to either download the app right then or save it later, once they were finished with their current experience.
What Immersv found was that 70 percent of viewers watched the video ad to completion, with 25 percent performing a “gaze-through” on one of the calls to action. By the end of the campaign’s completion Immersv say over 8,500 people visited the app’s page in Google Play during the five-week campaign. By comparison, mobile advertising tends to drive just 9.5% click through rates, while desktop advertising tends to drive approximately 0.4% click through rates, according to the Innovid 2016 Global Video Benchmarks report.
“OMD and the Hawaii Tourism Authority recently partnered with Immersv to reach new and relevant users through Immersv’s discovery & distribution network,” said Aileen Viray, Senior Project Manager, Zero Code OMD USA, the agency that ran the campaign with Immersv. “Travel and tourism as a whole are a natural fit for VR, as it allows users to see themselves in another space and drives the desire to have that experience in real life. We are excited to have found a way to engage travelers through this up and coming medium.”
“We are witnessing the rise of a whole new medium and a powerful new channel for marketers,” said Mihir Shah, Immersv’s CEO. “The extremely high engagement rates of the ‘Let Hawaii Happen’ campaign and other 360°/VR ads on our platform demonstrate that consumers are clearly hungry for more content and experiences. Right now, there’s an enormous opportunity for marketers in travel and tourism as well as in other verticals who want to leverage the power of 360° and Virtual Reality marketing.”
The jury’s still out on if the upcoming Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them movie will be a worthy addition to the world of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise, but its VR tie-in experience suggests good things, even if it’s a little underwhelming.
Fantastic Beasts could be considered a headlining app for Daydream View, out today. It was announced by Google itself at a press conference last month and is made by visual effects giant Framestore, which has other exciting goings on in VR right now. It’s a free download on the Google Play Store, and serves as a good introduction to the world of VR for inexperienced Potter fans, though VR veterans will make quick note of the limitations in both software and hardware.
The app plays out over several well-detailed environments. You start by heading into the suitcase of Newt Scamander, the movie’s protagonist, to find a sort of wizard’s zoo. He’s keeping several, for lack of better words, fantastical beasts inside the Tardis-like suitcase, and you’ll be able to summon three of them and interact with them. There’s the phoenix-like Thunderbird, a cross between an elephant and rhino named an Erumpent, and a… weird squid thing called the Graphorn.
To summon each you head to Scamander’s shack and perform a spell, which involves using the Daydream controller as a wand to trace out patterns that appear on-screen. You’ll then complete a small, simple puzzle, either mixing potions together in a specific order, moving blocks to align a drawing, or crushing plants together. You can then go outside and meet the animal you’ve summoned, perhaps feeding it or playing with it.
Framestore’s knack for stunning visuals is proudly on display here; each beast is meticulously detailed and wouldn’t look out of place in the movie itself. If the feature fiilm has as much imagination as these three monsters suggest it will be a treat for the eyes.
The trade-off is the sense of scale that these encounters provide. It never really feels like any of these beasts are in front of you, more like you’re looking at them in a 360 video, which I suspect is really the case given the visual fidelity. Honestly, I’d have happily traded the sheer detail seen in each animal for a better actual 3D effect. The horn on the Erumpent’s head at one point threatens to pierce you, but I didn’t get a sense that it was truly lingering over me. The Thunderbird stretched its wings, but I was not intimated in its majesty.
As someone that’s used to position-tracked controls, I also took issue with Fantastic Beast‘s representation of input. I’d been fine with the Daydream controller simply being a pointer in this world, but instead you see your wand in the hand you’re holding the device with. The position and movement of your hand rarely correlates with what you see on-screen, and it ended up distracting me more than tricking me into thinking I was holding a wizard’s wand. This is something Daydream developers will really need to consider if they want to maintain immersion in their experiences going forward.
To the untrained eye, the Fantastic Beasts VR app is a fun introduction to Daydream, but I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed by it. It’s a fun showcase of what’s possible on Google’s new headset, but it flags up some of the major limitations too.
You’ve seen Framestore’s work before. The visual effects studio’s digital fingerprints can be found in some of the most successful films of recent times like Avengers: Age of Ultron, memorable commercials such as Shell’s Shapeshift promo, and even a few VR apps including the upcoming Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them experience for Google Daydream.
But what you might not have seen is something Framestore actually made from the ground up. By that I mean something the studio owns, an IP it created to utilize its own storytelling and technical talent for projects that actually mean something to itself beyond a paycheck at the end of a few months’ of work.
That’s where Framestore Ventures comes in. This is an internal group that is building a stable of IP and products that the company has complete creative control over.
“We have some of the best artists and technical folk in the world working here and they’ve all got brilliant ideas and create ideas for clients and they also create ideas in their heads for themselves but have nowhere to put them,” Gaby Darbyshire, Prinicpal of Ventures, tells me. It’s an exciting prospect, the thought of taking the immense talent housed under Framestore’s various offices and switching their focus from the corporate to the creative. What’s even more exciting is that the group is working with the company’s dedicated VR studio.
Quietly announced earlier this month, Somnia is the latest in a growing trend of narrative-driven VR experiences that aren’t necessarily games so much as interactive stories. Like Jon Faveru’s Gnomes and Goblins or the upcoming Darth Vader Star Wars story, it casts the audience as an actual character in the world that they’re free to explore, but they won’t encounter any significant challenges or mechanics to block their path to the end. They’re there to experience a story in an intimate, personalized way, not triumph over evil or rack up high scores.
This story in particular is one of both sci-fi and, based on the first trailer (embedded above,) horror.
I first heard about Somnia through a tie-in comic book that accompanied the launch of Madefire’s Gear VR app a few weeks back. Framestore itself is an investor in Madefire, and supporting its new venture with a tease of what’s to come made sense for the company. “Our guys can pitch projects internally to be a part of the Madefire slate and we will do the art and script development and everything else to make it happen,” Darbyshire explains of the pair’s relationship. One of those pitches was for an origins story for the upcoming app.
“The comic book tells the backstory of one of the characters and some of the technology involved in the core Somnia story, or the origin of how we came to where we are in the story now,” Michael Cable, Technical Director of the VR group, tells me. In the actual experience, you’ll awaken to find yourself alone on a spaceship in the middle of a journey to save your planet. As you explore, however, you’ll encounter “unusual happenings” including the appearance of ghost-like characters seen in the trailer. “They start off just being glimpses out of the corner of your eye but you getting the feeling that there’s something other-world going on”, Cable says.
From the sounds of it, Somnia could have easily been a survival horror game with full mechanics, but that idea isn’t of interest to its creators.
“If VR is going to be a medium that’s wider than gaming and given the incredibly high costs of making beautiful, high-fidelity games, an easier chance of doing it in the short term until we figure out what the install base is going to be and how popular it’s going to be as a medium is to do something a little less complicated than a game and slightly less narratively complicated than a movie,” Darbyshire states. Framestore describes this as a “sweet spot” while the processes of making full VR movies remains uncharted.
Hitting that point home, Cable talks of early cinema and the struggle to make sure shooting was consistent. “We’re in that sort of point with VR,” he says. And Cable is one to talk; he’s been working on on tech since the days of the Oculus Rift DK1, developing Framestore’s Game of Thrones: Ascend The Wall experience.
It’s still early days for Somnia right now. It’s releasing in 2017, though Framestore wouldn’t confirm any launch platforms. It did state they would like it to be on all headsets eventually.
There have been a fair few announcements to come from the relatively concise Google event that took place this evening, including the Google Pixel smartphone and Google Daydream View. To go along with these two reveals, there needs to be applications, and it seems as though there was a big reveal for Harry Potter fans hidden up their wizard sleeve.
Adrienne McCallister who is the leader of partnerships for Daydream came up on stage, and one of the first announcements was of this new Harry Potter franchised title made with Framestore: “With Daydream you’re going to be able to explore some really magical places, and what’s more magical than the wizarding world of J.K Rowling? I’m excited to announce that we’ve been working with Warner Brothers to bring an exclusive Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them experience to Daydream.”
In the preview shown during the event it looks as though players can wave the controller as the wand and interact with various surroundings as well as with the beasts. “In it you’re a wizard and the controller transforms into a wand that you can use to levitate objects and cast spells. We’re really stoked about this because don’t we all just want to be wizards?”
There has been no specific date set for this, but check back with VRFocus for the latest news, updates, and features in the world of VR.
The appeal of using virtual reality (VR) for tourism purposes is simple, the tech allows anyone from wherever they are in the world to experience what their chosen destination will be like. VR has already been used by airlines and tourism operators, and now promoting travel to the Hawaiian Islands, the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) is introducing a VR tour experience.
Four islands, Oahu, Maui, Kauai and Hawaii, are featured in the Hawaii VR experience with the tour starting with the user floating as a paraglider through clear blue skies above the islands. Users select an island to explore, then descend into the midst of a tour experience highlighting that island’s particular allure, environment and attractions with an island-based resident narrates as the tour guide.
Hawaii VR combines live-action footage with interactive elements, offering a virtual sightseeing of the islands spectacular landscapes, including coastlines, waterfalls and rainforests, coupled with activities, such as hula, surfing and catamaran sailing.
Leslie Dance, HTA vice president of marketing and product development, said, “Anyone who loves Hawaii or dreams about coming here is going to be amazed at how they can suddenly be in the islands whenever they want and capture the magic of being here. This virtual reality tour is a new platform for showcasing Hawaii’s culture and natural environment, the two pillars of our global appeal.
“This VR experience will be an educational tool for travellers, as well as travel trade professionals, about the diversity of the Hawaiian Islands and help inspire the booking of vacations.”
The tour will debut at the 2016 Hawaii Tourism Conference, 26th-30th September 2016, at the Hawaii Convention Center, with demo stations placed in the conference Tech Hub of the Village Square for attendees to try out.
The experience was conceived by OMD’s Zero Code in collaboration with Hawaii-based agency MVNP and visual effects shop Framestore. The HTA will also be launching a version for Oculus Rift and Android smartphones later this year.
For all the latest VR news from around the world, keep reading VRFocus.
The Last Moments immerses users in the discussion about euthanasia with a VR film that reveals the process of an assisted death.
Virtual reality and empathy go hand in hand. The very nature of being closed off to the world, void of all peripheral distractions, is an effective aid to focussing on powerful subject matter. Directors are realising that putting you in the shoes of those having to make life or death choices can have a profound effect on the viewer.
One such director is Avril Furness whose short 360 degree film The Last Moments I watched at Grand Central Recording Studios (GCRS) in London. Doning the Samsung Gear VR headset, I found myself in a very ordinary room, bed bound with my emotional wife sitting at the end, trying to offer comfort through tears and jokes, as she was about to become a widow.
A mentor from Dignitas—the Swiss based not-for-profit organisation that offers assisted dying services—robotically described how the cocktail I would drink would put me into a sleep I would never wake up from.
My choice was to continue to live or take the cocktail and die. Out of curiousity I chose the latter, but was surprised to then learn that 86% of real Dignitas volunteers don’t go through to the ultimate end stage.
Furness based the thought provoking film on a script she had penned exploring an overpopulated dystopian future where salesmen sold euthanasia packages door to door, as if some innocuous household product.
During her research, she visited an exhibition called Death: The Human Experience at the Bristol museum which housed a replica of a ward from Dignitas. Sitting in the very ordinary room, Furness described having a profound emotional experience, which she felt could be transferred to others as a 360 degree short film.
Furness studied video documentation of approximately fifteen assisted dying procedures, transcribing the script into one narrative.
“It is not always as bleak as you might think” she said. “In the videos there were lots of nervous jokes and agitation to keep it light hearted for the volunteer. I wanted to bring that out in the script.”
The Last Moments was premiered at a euthanasia conference in Amsterdam, attended by specialists, volunteers and pro right-to-die campaigners. The presentation moved many to tears with one gentlemen not able to watch to the end such was its intensity.
Initially, The Last Moments struggled to get off the ground.
“It was a really difficult relationship with Dignitas at first” admitted Furness. “They were very sceptical and negative. As the conversation developed, they were quite specific about filming in the replica room in Bristol rather than at their premises to ensure this was a tasteful artistic representation of what happens.”
Such was the turnaround, at one point Dignitas even proposed putting a 360 degree rig on a real volunteer to die on camera but Furness wanted to avoid anything that could cross into morbid voyeurism.
The result is a powerful 360 short that stays in your head long after you take the Gear VR off. It is the ordinariness of the environment and the procedure that is at odds with the gravitas of the situation. The contrast of the emotion of your loved one and the clinical nature of the Dignitas mentor is just as difficult to process.
Looking at the experience from a production standpoint, I really appreciated how passionate and supportive the companies involved in the project were. The Last Moments was a collaboration between Framestore, VISYON 360, Grand Central Recording Studios and theatre company Punchdrunk, which would have had a fraction of the budget of the productions they would typically be involved with.
With just three hours to shoot the entire sequence, a GoPro 360 rig was placed on a mannequin with an ambisonic microphone. The 3D audio was vital for the realism of the experience led by Steve Lane and George Castle of GCRS. This was their first commercial foray into virtual reality, having traditionally worked on sound design for high end movies and commercials.
Looking back Castle reflected “It was relatively early into our foray into the VR world and a great learning experience. What excites me is what is possible now compared to 6 months ago is massive.”
Lane is equally excited to work on sound design for VR projects, appealing for a more standardised process. “Spatial audio is great but there isn’t a defined format. We can chose from four or five delivery methods so that is going to have to become a more streamlined process. With The Last Moments we only had to consider the Samsung Gear VR but in the future I would love to see software coming to market that makes this possible. We are having to use an older Oculus Rift development kit headset because Pro Tools is only Mac compatible but the new Oculus is only PC compatible. It’s just all over the place at the moment.”
Framestore were bought in to do the post production under the guidance of Executive Producer David Hay and VISYON 360 did the final stitching for the piece that was painstakingly as close to the real procedure as possible, right down to the labels on the bottles.
There was genuine altruism behind the project and a reminder that virtual reality can excite and bring out the best of pioneers keen to showcase the power of the medium.
The Last Moments is currently touring festivals and will be made available on YouTube 360 once the tour is over.
