One of the earliest virtual reality (VR) short films to make an impact was ABE VR by British studio Hammerhead. The award-winning short film by Rob McLellan was originally released way back in 2013, with Hammerhead giving it a VR twist in 2016. Today, the studio has revealed plans to expand the ABE universe in three parts.
ABE will be returning as a location-based VR experience (LBE), brought to life using advanced virtual humans filmed at the Dimension volumetric capture studio, as well as a continuation of the short film and as a videogame which will be VR compatible.
ABE VR tells the dark and twisted tale of ABE, a misguided robot seeking the unconditional love of humans in all the wrong places. While the original experience was merely a film where viewers found themselves strapped to a surgical table, unable to move, what Hammerhead VR has planned will be far more interactive by the sounds of it, and even more horrifying.
The new trailer gives a glimpse at the plans Hammmerhead has in store, with the player running through a rather grim looking mansion. All the windows and doors are being sealed with metal shutters apart from one, funnelling the player. At the end of a corridor the floor suddenly opens up and they fall into an abattoir, filled with pigs and human corpses. Standing in the middle is ABE.
“Hammerhead have been at the forefront of immersive storytelling for the past five years. With ABE VR we introduced genre-defining techniques, which led to the experience becoming the first VR film to be certified by the BBFA, and subsequently selected for the BAFTA VR showcase. Now ABE is back, more sinister than ever, with exciting and innovative creative ambitions,” says Simon Windsor, joint-MD of Hammerhead in a statement.
Hammerhead hasn’t stated when any of this planned content will be released, although the LBE project will be the lead experience. VRFocus will continue its coverage of ABE VR and Hammerhead VR, reporting back with the latest updates.
Having a state-of-the-art volumetric and 3D capture studio doesn’t come easy. However, when it came to the setting up Dimension Studio, it only took about a year. Dimension Studio opened on the 24th October 2017, in London thanks to the partnership of Hammerhead VR, Digital Catapult and Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studio. Harnessing six years of Microsoft research and one of the only three of such studios globally, Dimension Studio is the start for the next generation of immersive content in Europe. Callum Macmillan, Director at Dimension Studio gave VRFocus a tour of the first Microsoft Mixed Reality capture stage in the world.
A dancer being captured inside the volumetric studio.
For those of you who do not know what volumetric capture is, it is essentially a moving image that you can look at from any angle. It’s free viewpoint content – a system for viewing natural video, allowing the user to interactively control the viewpoint and generate new views of a dynamic scene from any 3D position. When it comes to virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) or even regular videogames, the ability to portray a realistic human is usually done through animating virtual human beings. This breaks the ‘illusion’, as we can visually tell through subtle nuances, movements, eye contact and movement that what we are looking at is not ‘reality’. Dimension Studio aims to solve this problem by capturing real humans and creating a virtual asset of their performance that can then be used in VR, AR or MR applications.
Macmillan has had 20 years of experience in camera technologies. Anything that would that involve filming a scene with multiple cameras, such as bullet time from The Matrix (1999). He explains that capture the virtual human can be done in their capture studio which has a total of 106 cameras. The stage is built up of eight towers on wheels, each tower has twelve cameras on them creating a circular array of 96 cameras. The twelve cameras consist of six RGB cameras and six infrared cameras, combined with lasers and lights to capture 2K resolution details of a human being.
The towers are on wheels to either film one to three individuals on the stage that measures up to eight feet across. When capturing a single individual and there is little movement, they will bring the towers closer to the subject in order to get the highest quality of capture. They have to be careful not to bring too many individuals in, particularly when characters interact, as object occlusion can take place. Occlusion takes place when one object in a 3D space is blocking another object from view from the cameras, distorting the image or footage capture. The additional ten cameras suspended from the top of stage complete the whole set up. The team have also put eight microphones on the top to get a good level, though the production team may choose to use clip mics or lav mics depending on the costume or clothing the subject needs to wear during the shoot. Macmillan explains that they’re not trying to do anything fancy with microphones like spatial audio, as this can be done in post-production. When VRFocuscame by they had just added a bar on top in order to suspend people from the bar with wires for VFX or wire work, enabling action shots like flying for example. A similar setup also exists in the studio but with a primary focus on non-moving objects
At the moment anybody can hire the studio space. Production and animation houses can book the studio on a commercial basis, and researchers working in the immersive field that are seeking to push the boundaries are also welcome to come by.The footage captured can be used for various industries such as gaming, TV, film, fashion, digital manufacturing, health and education just to name a few. Macmillan says that clients from an entertainment background, education, training and marketing are huge sectors that are excited about using their space. Dimension Studio is currently working with Sky VR and other broadcast partners to produce unique experiences across drama, sport and documentaries.
