Anything Star Wars related tends to be big news, so today, location-based virtual reality (VR) specialist The VOID has revealed a major announcement. In partnership with Lucasfilm and ILMxLAB, the company has unveiled Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, an immersive experience that’ll feature at The VOID’s two new experience centres in the US.
These two centres will be located at Downtown Disney at Disneyland Resort and Disney Springs at Walt Disney World Resort, opening this holiday season.
ILMxLAB, created the experience, in collaboration with The VOID, putting guests directly into the iconic Star Wars galaxy. Using The VOID’s own custom built, untethered VR system – as used in the Ghostbusters: Dimensions experience – attendees will be able move freely throughout the multi-sensory experience as they interact and engage with friends, family and Star Wars characters.
“At The VOID, we combine the magic of illusions, advanced technology and virtual reality to create fully immersive social experiences that take guests to new worlds, said Curtis Hickman, co-founder and chief creative officer at The VOID in a statement. A truly transformative experience is so much more than what you see with your eyes; it’s what you hear, feel, touch, and even smell. Through the power of The VOID, guests who step into Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire won’t just see this world, they’ll know that they are part of this amazing story.”
“At ILMxLAB, we want people to step inside the worlds of our stories, explained Vicki Dobbs Beck, executive in charge of the division. Through our collaboration with The VOID, we can make this happen as guests become active participants in an unfolding Star Wars adventure. By combining Lucasfilm’s storytelling expertise with cutting-edge imagery, and immersive sound from the team at Skywalker Sound, while invoking all the senses, we hope to truly transport all those who experience Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire to a galaxy far, far away.”
As the company continues its expansion, earlier this year The VOID appointed former Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic CTO, Cliff Plumer, as CEO. While in July it joined the Disney Accelerator Program.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of The VOID, reporting back with the latest announcements.
If you need proof that the virtual reality (VR) industry is having an impact on Hollywood then these past couple of weeks are a good example. Wesley Snipes’ new sci-fi flick The Recall has a companion VR experience and so does upcoming movie Spider-Man: Homecoming. Adding to that list is director Michael Bay with Transformers: The Last Knight VR Experience which is coming to select IMAX VR centres.
Transformers: The Last Knight VR Experience is a single-player, VR shooter that teams players with Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Hound to recover a powerful weapon from the Decepticons. They must protect and securely transport the weapon in order to prevent the destruction of a nearby metropolis. Putting players right into the action straight away, the experience sees them immediately being attacked by the Decepticons as they attempt to steal back the weapon.
“I wanted to do something special for fans, to let them feel what it’s like to be in the middle of intense Transformers action,” said Bay in a statement. “ILMxLAB was a great partner in delivering this experience, and pushing the envelope of what VR can do.”
The five-minute experience was produced by Bay in collaboration with ILMxLAB, and Paramount Pictures, and uses the HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD).
“We are thrilled to deliver ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ VR Experience to AMC guests in New York and Southern California,” said Elizabeth Frank, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Programming & Chief Content Officer, AMC Theatres. “The VR experience produced by Michael Bay is a wonderful way for our guests to immerse themselves in the Transformers world, and it is a perfect complement to our IMAX VR at AMC Kips Bay 15 VR Centre.”
Transformers: The Last Knight VR Experience will be available this Friday, 30th June, free of charge for a limited time in IMAX VR centres at AMC Kips Bay 15 in New York City and across from The Grove in Los Angeles and in select AMC Theatres lobbies.
For all the latest movie and VR tie-in news, keep reading VRFocus.
Google’s newly announced Seurat rendering tech purportedly makes use of ‘surface light-fields’ to turn high-quality CGI film assets into detailed virtual environments that can run on mobile VR hardware. The company gave Seurat to ILMxLab, the immersive entertainment division of Industrial Light and Magic, to see what they could do with it using assets directly from Star Wars.
Google says Seurat makes use of something called surface light-fields, a process which involves taking original ultra-high quality assets, defining a viewing area for the player, then taking a sample of possible perspectives within that area to determine everything that possibly could be viewed from within it. The high-quality assets are then reduced to a significantly smaller number of polygons—few enough that the scene can run on mobile VR hardware—while maintaining the look of high quality assets, including perspective-correct specular lightning.
As a proof of concept, Google teamed with ILMxLab to show what Seurat could do. In the video above, xLab says they took their cinema-quality CGI renders—those which would normally take a long time to render each individual frame of final movie output—and ran them through Seurat to make them able to playback in real-time on Google’s mobile VR hardware. You can see a teaser video heading this article.
“When xLab was approached by Google, they said that they could take our ILM renders and make them run in real-time on the VR phone… turns out it’s true,” said Lewey Geselowitz, Senior UX Engineer at ILM.
When I put on the headset I was dropped into the same hangar scene as shown in the video. And while there’s no replacing the true high quality ray-traced output that comes from the cinematic rendering process (that can take hours for each frame), this was certainly some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen running on mobile VR hardware. In addition to sharp, highly detailed models, the floor had dynamic specular reflections, evoking the same sort of lightning you would expect from some of the best real-time visuals running on high-end PC headsets.
What’s particularly magic about Seurat is that—unlike a simple 360 video render—the scene you’re looking at is truly volumetric, and properly stereoscopic no matter where you look. That means that when you move your head back and forth, you’ll get proper positional tracking and see parallax, just like you’d expect from high-end desktop VR content. And because Google’s standalone headset has inside-out tracking, I was literally able to walk around the scene in a room-scale sized area with a properly viewable area that extended all the way from the floor to above my head.
I’ve seen a number of other light-field approaches running on VR hardware and typically the actual viewing area is much smaller, often just a small box around your head (and when you exit that area the scene is no longer rendered correctly). That’s mainly for two reasons: the first of is that it can take a long time to render large areas, and second is that large areas create huge file sizes that are difficult to manage and often impractical distribute.
Google says that Seurat scenes, on the other hand, result in much smaller file sizes than other light-field techniques. So small that the company says that a mobile VR experience with many individual room-scale viewing areas could be distributed in a size that’s similar to a typical mobile app.
As any reputable Star Wars fan will know, tomorrow is Star Wars Day – or May 4th to be exact – and usually there’s all sorts of promotions, reveals, announcements and anything else to do with the franchise. And virtual reality (VR) is no different. Today HTC Vive has announced that Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine will be coming to Viveport to celebrate the event.
Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine was an experiment by ILMxLAB to create a short immersive experience set in the sci-fi universe. The experience is actually new in anyway – it launched last July on Steam for free – but with HTC Vive aggressively promoting Viveport with more content and its subscription service, now users can dive into the sands of Tatooine.
As a special bonus the developers behind the app will feature in a behind the scenes Facebook video. The stream will begin at 1pm PT (4am ET/9PM GMT) on 4th May via the HTC Vive Facebook Page.
Taking place on the renowned planet, Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine gives players the opportunity to repair the iconic Millennium Falcon, and defend the plucky droid hero R2-D2 from incoming stormtroopers with their lightsaber.
ILMxLAB answered several questions on a HTC Vive blog post about the experience, saying: “Trials on Tatooine began as a test, a question, really: can we render the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars: The Force Awakens at 90 frames per second? That’s all we wanted to do. But of course, we couldn’t help ourselves from adding a bit of movie magic to the experiment, complete with animation, a Tatooine environment, and surround sound from the experts at Skywalker Sound. This was our first taste and green light to keep exploring and pushing the interactivity of this new medium as the future of storytelling.”
“Trials on Tatooine was ILMxLAB’s first foray into real-time rendering and with it came a lot of lessons learned. We are so excited to be expanding and building upon our Trials on Tatooine foundation on projects such as the Darth Vader VR story experience and Meet BB-8″
VRFocus will continue its coverage of ILMxLAB’s VR projects, reporting back with any further updates.
Friday is here and an end to a very long week for all concerned what with both the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona as well as the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. It was a big week, and so we’re starting off today with an equally big video.
The video in question is a promotional trailer in 360 degrees (and created in partnership by Legendary VR and ILMxLAB) for forthcoming film Kong: Skull Island, which will star the likes of Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and John C. Reilly. However the character we’re going to be hearing from in this experience called KONG VR: Destination Skull Island (as we set off on a helicopter trip above the jungle) is that of Lt. Colonel Packard. A man who is played in the film by the one and only Samuel L. Jackson. Now, when you’re flying the last thing you really want is someone telling a flying-related story of death by misadventure. But ignoring this Packard narrates to you part of the Greek fable of Icarus. Naturally the fates conspire at that point for your flight to take a turn for the worse as you get up close and personal with one of Skull Island’s inhabitants.
And he isn’t particularly happy to see you…
VRFocusis back with another Life In 360° on Monday.
Running in partnership with Lucasfilm ILMxLAB, the Disability Visibility Project – an online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and sharing disability stories and culture – is currently running an online survey for people with disabilities, focused on virtual reality (VR).
In the survey Disability Visibility Project covers a range of topics which include: user experiences of VR, accessibility issues that users have with VR and any thoughts or ideas respondents may have relating to VR for people with disabilities. As the survey is partnered with Lucasfilm there are some questions refering to the recent VR experience Trials on Tatooine for those that have tried the experience, although knowledge of the title isn’t required to participate in the questionnaire.
The online survey can be found here, and the deadline for respondents is 31st January 2017. The results of the survey will be presented and shared with the VR developer community at the Virtual Reality Developers Conference 2017 (VRDC) during February in San Francisco, California by the team from ILMxLAB.
The Disability Visibility Project was founded in 2014 by Alice Wong in San Francisco. Wong, who serves as Project Coordinator along with several volunteers, is a Staff Research Associate for the Community Living Policy Center, a Rehabilitation Research and Training Center funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) and the Administration for Community Living.
For all the latest VR news from around the world, keep reading VRFocus.
Disney’s ILMxLab has been busy of late. In addition to the free Trials on Tatooine virtual reality experience for HTC Vive, the studio released a 360-degree video that serves as a prequel to the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The POV experience, available through Verizon, chronicles the first discovery of the Death Star and puts viewers inside the cockpit of an X-Wing pilot. ILMxLab also worked with Electronic Arts and developer DICE to allow PlayStation VR users to pilot those rebel ships in the upcoming Dec. 6 Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission.
Rob Bredow, the chief technology officer at Lucasfilm, has overseen the company’s R&D division, ILMxLab, since its inception. Bredow was recently in Milan, Italy for the VIEW Conference. He’s currently living in London and working on the new Han Solo movie with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller at Pinewood Studios. He told UploadVR that virtual reality is now part of the production process for the Star Wars films, something that commenced with Rogue One and director Gareth Edwards.
“One of my favorite quotes that Gareth said was after he’d been in VR like two or three minutes, ‘This looks way better in real life,’” Bredow said. “And I leaned over to Doug Chiang and asked him if his guys had already built one of these, and he’s like, ‘No, he’s talking about virtual reality right now, being inside the ship is way better than having to look at the drawings or 2D printouts or those kinds of things.’”
Bredow said that his team at ILMxLab is constantly learning as they experiment with different experiences across emerging platforms.
“There were so many things we learned from Trials on Tatooine,” Bredow said. “That was a great learning experience because we really did build that experience up as we were learning different things. We learned hundreds of things; probably thousands of things. One specific takeaway was in the sound design area. We walked away after Trials of Tatooine saying we need this close collaboration between the sound designers and the experience creators and the best situation is that that’s going on hand-in-hand, so that we can teach other things as we go through the process of making these experiences.”
Several of the early VR projects from ILMxLab, including Trials on Tatooine and the Magic Leap mixed reality droid experience, were built using Epic Games Unreal Engine 4 technology.
“We really are at the early stages of game engine technology for VR, and there are a whole bunch of challenges that come along with 90 frames per second and these very high frame rates, and of course everything being in stereo,” Bredow said. “But there are a whole bunch of opportunities that creates, as well. What we’re seeing right now is a lot of people taking the tools that happen to be available at the time that VR got this resurgence in popularity and retrofitting them into the best fit for VR.”
Although his team is working with game engine technology, they’re not focusing on game-length experiences. Bredow promised that new VR experiences like the one featuring Darth Vader that was recently announced, will be longer than Trials on Tatooine.
“Right now the kind of things we’re looking at are still nowhere near as long as something like Skyrim, and some of that is actually driven by our desire to really make very high quality content,” Bredow said. “And there’s certain economics that come with that. You have to be able to have enough time to put into those experiences to really warrant a many hour experience, and right now honestly virtual reality is in its early days so you don’t get to make that same sort of investment, so the experience length is going to be a little bit shorter as a result.”
ILMxLab is very familiar with PS VR thanks to its work with EA and DICE. Bredow said he’s excited about Sony’s new platform because it allows gamers to plug into a box they probably already have in their living room, and it’s dramatically less expensive than HTC Vive and Oculus Rift if you already have the existing components.
“The living room is a really great way to experience VR and a lot of people are going to have really good experiences and we’re going to see a much bigger user base,” Bredow said. “So today we’re in a ‘chicken and the egg’ situation where everyone’s wondering how big is that user base going to be, how much time can I invest in these experiences to be able to sell them from a financial sense. After these holidays and into next year we’ll see an audience that is growing and more interested in virtual reality.”
At the same time the home VR scene is expanding, a new wave of virtual reality arcades and experiences are popping up around the world. That includes established companies like IMAX, which has partnered with Starbreeze, as well as startups like The Void, which launched Ghostbusters: Dimenion earlier this year at Madame Tussaud’s.
“We’re really interested at ILMxLab in location-based entertainment as it relates to virtual reality,” Bredow said. “We think there are things we can do in that space where you really control the environment and you can put a higher-quality headset on someone’s head and power it with a machine that might be five times as powerful as the one you have at home. The haptics and other things you can do in those environments can be very unique and very fun and give people a different kind of experience. The home VR experience is going to be very interesting and there’s a ton to explore there, but then when you add other elements of haptics and environment and things you can do in a location that you can’t do at your house that starts to get really interesting.”
Various industries are tapping virtual reality when trying to innovate within their marketing departments. Though it hasn’t hit the majority of homes just yet, VR is something that can make in-store and event venue displays stand out. Previously we’ve reported on just this type of promo, including Adidas’ VR sport boot launch in London. Various films have even taken advantage of VR promos with experiences like The Martian. The Star Wars franchise has the benefit of having permeated nearly every facet of entertainment you can imagine, from toys to comics to entire expos, but the powers-that-be aren’t shy about utilizing VR, and Verizon has partnered with Lucasfilm for an experience that’s available in their stores exclusively from November 10th -13th: Rogue One: Recon – A Star Wars 360 experience. If you miss out, it’ll be made available on the Verizon Facebook page on the 14th.
Rogue One: Recon, developed by ILMxLAB, is a 360-degree video from the perspective of an X-Wing scout that just happens to come across the infamous Death Star along with another pilot. The two make a jump into dangerous territory and attempt to warn the rebels about what they find. The Rogue One film’s plot gets moving when the Rebels intercept a coded imperial message about a weapons test that ends up being the Death Star, so it seems the two scouts from Recon failed to make contact. Although brief, Recon is a cool way drop fans of Star Wars into the story in anticipation of Rogue One.
The first viewing will have focused on the action, but second and third viewings let you appreciate a lot of details including the many instruments within the X-Wing’s cockpit. Rogue One: Recon is a snack sized feature with high production values, a signal that developers are putting their best foot forward with VR. The few minutes fly by and leave you wanting more at their conclusion, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do. Head into a Verizon store until Nov. 25 to see it for yourself.
We are just under a month away from this year’s VRX event and the conference and expo continues to add names to the list of speakers and representatives attending the event to be held in San Francisco, California over December 7th and 8th.
Four new speakers have been revealed for VRX 2016, including David Campbell of IMAX Corporation, Chris Horton of Universal Music Group and Carlos Saavedra of PepsiCo. The pick of the bunch however is John Gaeta. Gaeta is ILMxLAB’s Executive Creative Director and well known for his work on the Matrix trilogy of films. Gaeta will be presenting a session entitled “Star Wars, VR & The Frontiers of Storytelling” which will dip into how ILM are using virtual reality (VR) in order to develop new ways to tell the Star Wars story. This is, obviously, of particular interest with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story set to hit cinemas at around the same time. He’ll be joined by ILM’s Vicki Dobbs Beck in a discussion about “convergence between gaming, narrative storytelling and new experiences.”
ILMxLAB have previously this year released Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine on the HTC Vive, the feedback from which could well be discussed.
ILMxLAB joins a list of companies that includes representatives from virtual reality (VR) headset manufacturers Oculus, Google and for the HTC Vive as well as figures from key companies in both hardware and software side such as Intel (which recently acquired VOKE), Unity Technologies, Epic Games, Framestore, both NVIDIA and AMD as well as German automotive giants Audi and BMW.
For more on VRX 2016 and other VR related events stay tuned to future updates from VRFocus.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is just over a month away from hitting theaters, and we’re hoping Battlefield developer DICE’s companion VR experience, Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One: X-wing VR Mission, will arrive on PlayStation VR around the same time. But DICE isn’t the only developer with a hand in the demo.
As you’ll probably know, another studio is also working on official Star Wars VR content, the Industrial Light and Magic Experience Lab (ILMxLAB). So far this team, announced in mid-2015, has put out its own experience in a galaxy far, far away: Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine for the HTC Vive. We’ve always assumed that this group’s work was separate from the upcoming PS VR demo, which releases this year for free for Star Wars: Battlefront owners, but it was actually the result of “a very close collaboration” with ILMxLAB.
That is according to Rob Bredow, chief technology officer at Lucasfilm. He recently told DigitalTrends that the two studios “share assets back and forth”, suggesting that DICE’s work is helping ILMxLAB too. “If you look at some of the stuff that DICE has shared at technical conferences like SIGGRAPH, you’ll notice a lot of familiar things,” he said.
The Rogue One mission is set to arrive first on PlayStation VR. Published by Electronic Arts, the Rogue One X-Wing Mission is also being made with the help of UK-based studio, Criterion. It’s set to be a small experience and not a full game. ILMxLAB, meanwhile, is now working on a narrative-driven Star Wars VR piece that stars iconic franchise villain, Darth Vader. Sadly, Bredow didn’t have much more to share on when that might be releasing.
