Today, big tech companies including Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, announced the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), which is dedicated to promoting the standardization and development of a 3D file protocol that Apple says will “help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences.”
NVIDIA has been an early supporter of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD), stating last year it thinks Pixar’s solution has the potential to become the “HTML of the metaverse.”
Much like HTML forms a sort of description of a webpage—being hostable anywhere on the Internet and retrievable/renderable locally by a web browser—USD can be used to describe complex virtual scenes, allowing it to be similarly retrieved and rendered on a local machine.
Here’s how the alliance describes their new OpenUSD inititive:
Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD’s power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.
“Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline,” said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”
Housed by the Linux Foundation affiliate Joint Development Foundation (JDF), the alliance is hoping to attract a diverse range of companies and organizations to participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD actively. For now it counts Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA as foudning memebers, with general members including Epic Games, Unity, Foundry, Ikea, SideFX, and Cesium.
“OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s VP of the Vision Products Group. “Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.”
Khronos Group, the consortium behind the OpenXR standard, launched a similar USD initiative in the past via its own Metaverse Standards Forum. It’s unclear how much overlap these initiatives will have, as that project was supported by AOUSD founders Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA in addition to a wide swath of industry movers, such as Meta, Microsoft, Sony, Qualcomm, and AMD. Notably missing in the Metaverse Standards Forum was support from Apple and Pixar themselves.
We’re hoping to learn more at a long-form presentation of AOUSD during the Autodesk Vision Series on August 8th. There are a host of events leading up to SIGGRAPH 2023 though, which goes from August 6th – 10th, so we may learn more at any one of the companies’ own presentations on USD.
“Pixar originally didn’t want to do the project [Coco VR] because they didn’t think we could hit the quality bar that they found acceptable,” said Ben Grossmann, Co-Founder of Magnopus. “We had to prove ourselves.”
And they did just that. Magnopus is an entertainment experience company founded by people that have decades of experience, awards, and creativity. The Google meta description for their website explains that they aim to “tell stories without borders” and the “What” page of the site states that they’re “creating the impossible by any means necessary.”
What better way to do that than with the immersive power of virtual reality?
Greatest Work
“All new employees at Magnopus are told that, regardless of the problem or how new they are, that they have the power to raise their hand and say that something isn’t good enough,” said Grossmann.
From what I’ve heard in talking to people from Disney and Pixar, that’s very much along the lines of the same ideas those companies preach. Walt Disney himself once famously said, “Whatever you do, do it well,” and that feels like it’s ingrained into the DNA of not only Pixar and Disney as companies, but Magnopus as well. They may not be the household name that Pixar is, but it doesn’t mean that their work isn’t of award-worthy quality already.
In fact, Magnopus has already earned three different Emmy award nominations for its projects in the VR arena (Mission: ISS, Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab, and Coco VR) and it’s only a matter of time before one of them takes home the prize.
“Our secret sauce is all the projects that you haven’t seen,” said Alex Henning, another Co-Founder of Magnopus in an interview. “Being willing to iterate a lot and to try a lot of things early, to fail fast as it were and build up our knowledge as quickly as possible by tackling real world challenges.”
During our chat Grossmann told me that “Magnopus” is a portmanteau of the Latin words for “greatest work” (Magnum Opus) and they’ve built their entire company around that mantra. And they’re focusing so heavily on VR because they see it as the future of entertainment — at least until something better comes along.
“We want to take people beyond the movie theater,” said Grossmann. “We founded Magnopus right around when Oculus was getting out of Kickstarter and started out very quietly. We’ve stayed quiet. All the time people spend talking at conferences is time not spent actually pushing things forward. You could just go build it.”
Each of Magnopus’ three major VR projects to date (listed above) have been about not just replicating things you can see elsewhere, but rather putting you inside of an experience that transports you. Instead of re-enacting or watching a scene from the recent Blade Runner film, the Memory Lab experience gives you total freedom. Instead of walking through the land of the dead as Coco, you actually become one of the skeletons with full customization in a multiplayer sandbox environment. And Mission: ISS is still one of the best, most visually impressive, and engaging space simulations out there. The fact that NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency were all involved in that collaboration is immediately apparent.
“The mindset for us has always been to look for areas that we feel like we can concentrate and create some sort of lasting impact,” said Henning. “As interesting as it is to create this type of content, that’s just scratching the surface of what all of the applications of this technology [VR and AR] might be.”
There’s still a long way to go though. What Magnopus straddles the line between game and movie in a way that few things have and it really feels like the idea of a “VR experience” is starting to become more defined. Compare Coco VR to something like the Beauty and the Beat VR dress rehearsal and it’s like night and day. This stuff is truly on another level.
“You have to build up a culture where quality is a critical bar,” said Grossmann. “This medium is still so young and still evolving and there is a lot of stuff out there that just doesn’t work well. Now is the time to figure all that stuff out before the spotlight turns on with tens of millions of consumers.”
Obviously for a collaboration with Pixar, using their own original IP, it’s going to be sticky. That’s a company that cherishes their attention to quality and detail. The fact that they originally turned down Grossmann, Henning, and the rest of Magnopus — despite their previously existing awards and work — speaks volumes.
“For Coco VR, we asked ourselves, since it is an interactive experience that puts the user at the center, how little story can we have and still have it be fun? How much narrative is too much narrative? What’s the balance between linear and non-linear? If you take two friends and put them somewhere with fun stuff to do, we found most people will create their own experiences.”
As a consumer and someone that spends a lot of time in VR, it’s easy to notice things that don’t work well. As much as I love Skyrim VR, even after dozens of hours, I still find myself unsure about which buttons bring up which menus while playing. But if I put someone in Job Simulator, even if they’ve never tried VR or even a video game in their life, it’s immediately intuitive.
“For good VR, the technology should be invisible and it should just feel like magic,” said Grossmann. What better way to create magic than to get Disney and Pixar involved?
The Pixar Touch
“A couple years ago as VR was hot in the industry there was conversation internally about ‘Should we do VR’ at Pixar,” said Marc Sondheimer, Producer on Coco VR. “Something like a short story we could tell. At the same time we started thinking that an existing property would make it more cost effective. We even had the Disney Technology and Innovation Group approach us to explore VR with one of our film projects.”
And then, enter Magnopus. Their collaboration pitch was initially turned down, but they were able to win over Pixar with their ideas and attention to detail. This isn’t Disney’s first foray into VR by any means, especially if you consider The Void’s Star Wars experience, all of the 360 video work they’ve done, and the one-off apps we’ve seen pop up on stores. ILMxLAB’s Trials on Tatooine is still a fan favorite as well.
But the Coco VR project was very different.
“Usually we start with a traditional movie script and iterate on that before production, but VR is a different beast than cinema,” said John Halstead, Supervising Technical Director at Pixar. “We did go through a few versions of something you’d maybe call a script but it read more like a list of potential outcomes than an actual script.”
It’s a fascinating process to think about. Since a VR experience is a space that you can exist in, rather than a rectangle you stare at, there are so many more variables. The viewer’s whims and interests are for more likely to derail what you have planned since you can’t force someone to look at something in VR.
“We do a lot of story boarding, so our version of story boarding for this was basically creating a rough build of the experience and going through and talking about goals and what works,” said Halstead. “Like a 3D story board.”
One can only hope that Pixar’s interest in VR continues. The main thing that VR needs right now is great, immersive content from the masters of their craft. On the gaming front studios like Sony, Bethesda, Ubisoft, and more are all pushing VR heavily in their projects, so if more Hollywood-caliber companies like Pixar continue to step up, we could see a lot more projects like Coco VR getting awards and nominations from companies like Magnopus and others.
“We are still exploring the medium, but there are no concrete plans to shift attention from film to VR or anything like that,” said Sondheimer. “We are still interested in it and exploring it, but it’s also playin an important role in film production too. We are putting sets inside game engines so directors can explore the spaces in a headset as they make the film. That’s already being used in both Toy Story 4 and another 2019 film.”
Okay so, Toy Story 4 VR…please? Now that Kingdom Hears 3 is getting a VR experience, anything is possible, right?
Inter-disciplinary educational and technology event that showcases the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques has announced the full lineup for their Computer Animation Festival Electronic and Virtual Reality (VR) Theaters.
The SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival is known for continuously pushing the boundaries of computer-generated storytelling in film, videogames, visual effects, and more. Thanks to the improvements in immersive technology both VR and augmented reality (AR) have a place at the festival, showcasing what the technology is capable of achieving. For SIGGRAPH 2018, the theme of the conference is “Generations”, and keep to that the Electronic Theater’s lineup is poised to epitomize a next-generation showcase of 25 short films and
presentations, culled from over 400 submissions.
With an international showcase, the Electronic Theater will feature works from Ecuador, Spain, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Poland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States; five student projects; and, two major studio shorts – Pixar Animation Studios’ “Bao,” written and directed by the studio’s first-ever female director of a short film, Chinese-Canadian-American artist Domee Shi, and DreamWorks Animation’s “Bilby.” The Electronic Theater is set to run for three evenings from 13th August through to 15th August, as is a ticketed event.
“We will be presenting a high caliber of work this year from a very competitive, international field of submissions. Our jury commented several times that there were tough decisions to be made over pieces that might have been a ‘slam dunk’ in previous years,” said SIGGRAPH 2018 Computer Animation Festival Director Larry Bafia. “Each year, the Computer Animation Festival provides a spectrum of computer graphics that is unique from any other festival. The work shown ranges from hyper-real to stylized, from student grad projects to small studio work, from large studio shorts to visual effects house showcases. Our 2018 festival will, once again, present a great variety of styles of visual storytelling — sure to make for an entertaining and compelling show.”
It was also revealed last month that Disney Animation Studios with be debuting a VR short at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the form of Cycles. The short is said to be one of the highlights of the programmer, being an experiment film that centers around the meaning of ‘home’ and what it means to create one and the life that is lived within its walls.
SIGGRAPH 2018 is set to start on the 12th August and run until 16th August at the Vancouver Convention Centre, hosting a range of different programs within the conference and exhibition space. Further information and tickets can be found on the official SIGGRAPH website. For more news and coverage in the future, keep reading VRFocus.
Adobe recently unveiled a new project that aims to take the company further into the realm of augmented reality. Called Project Aero, the newly announced AR authoring tool and multi-platform system that will soon deliver a way for developers to build simple AR scenes and experiences for Apple’s ARKit.
In collaboration with Apple and Pixar, Adobe is also adding ‘usdz’ support to Adobe Creative Cloud apps and services, a file format that is a zero compression, unencrypted zip archive for 3D content such as AR/VR objects. The integration of usdz support was first announced at Apple’s WWDC, which saw the release of ARKit 2.0.
Users, the company says, will be able to create AR content using industry standard tools such as Photoshop CC and Dimension CC, and then “convert assets into usdz that can be natively consumed in the Apple ecosystem,” writes CTO Abhay Parasnis in an Adobe blogpost.
Essentially, Adobe is taking one step further into a world still largely dominated by 3D game engines such as Unreal and Unity, which could foretell and interesting forward march from 2D creation to a decidedly more 3D-focused business. Project Aero is heading into early access soon, and is available right now by request-only.
To show off what’s possible with Project Aero, Adobe has partnered with 15 artists for The Festival of the Impossible, a three-day immersive art exhibition in San Francisco which is featured in the video above.
“This is just the beginning of our journey to extend digital experiences beyond the screen and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead,” Parasnis says. “We’ll have much more to share at the Adobe MAX Creativity Conference later this fall.”
Through films like Finding Nemo and Toy Story, Pixar Animation Studios has redefined the cinema over the past few years. But one of the company’s figureheads is looking to VR and AR to transform another important pillar: education.
Pixar co-founder and chief scientist Loren Carpenter recently said as much to Tes following a lecture he gave inside VR last month. “I feel very optimistic about the educational potential of augmented reality and VR devices,” Carpenter said. “I think the application of VR in education is one of the greatest steps in years.”
Last month students at the Windsor Forest Colleges Group in Slough, UK were treated to an in-VR talk from Carpenter, who was beamed into HTC Vives as he spoke in California. Carpenter envisioned trips to Mars inside headsets where teachers can label points of interest and show the solar system in scale. That sounds a little like Google’s existing Expeditions platform, though that’s yet to leave our planet.
Carpenter is also a big believer in AR, though he believes it’s still a few years away from ‘practical’ use.
It’s always encouraging to see people as influential as Carpenter showing their support for VR and AR. While we may not be seeing any Pixar VR movies any time soon, we agree with Carpenter that the potential for these technologies to be used in education is massive. In fact, we’re already seen plenty of examples of this, from virtual museums to games that teach you through playing.
Kingdom Hearts 3 features seven dazzling Disney and Pixar worlds to explore. This time around, the wondrous combat matches the magic of the scenery and characters.
Pixar Animation Studios are one of the biggest names in modern animation, with its movies and short films repeatedly redefining what was possible with computer animation. Virtual reality (VR) education company VR Education Holdings are seeking to draw on that expertise with the appointment of Pixar co-founder Loren Carpenter as advisor to the company.
VR Education Holdings is one of several firms that are leveraging immersive technologies in a bid to improve education and training. The company has been involved in the creation of VR education experiences such as Titanic VR, and hope that the addition of Carpenter’s experience will prove beneficial to its future efforts.
Loren Carpenter has won numerous awards for his work in animation, such as Academy Award for his significant achievements in the field of motion picture rendering. He was the co-inventor of the Reyes rendering algorithm, which allowed 3D computer graphics to render photo-realistic images and was also one of the creators behind the PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which renders all of Pixar’s movies.
Carpenter had this to say regarding his appointment: “I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the meticulous approach VR Education has taken in all of their projects. It’s refreshing to see such attention to detail and I admire how much the company has achieved from its inception, just three years ago.”
David Whelan, CEO of VR Education Holdings said: “We are incredibly pleased to have Loren – a luminary of the industry on board. Having grown Pixar from a small company to a multi-billion-dollar business by the time it was acquired by Disney, his advice will be invaluable to VR Education when we take our next steps. As always, our mission remains to provide world class educational platform and experiences to people across the globe and we’re thrilled that now we have Loren to assist us.”
For further news on VR in education and other updates from the VR industry, keep checking back with VRFocus.
Interactive VR short film Asteroids!, the follow-up to Emmy award-winning VR short Invasion! (2016) is now available for Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows MR headsets. From the director of the Madagascar franchise, the full 11-minute cut continues the journey of aliens Mac and Cheez (and robot sidekick Peas) on their deep space mission.
Baobab Studios announced Asteroids! at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016, and has since made an interactive preview of the animation available on Gear VR and Daydream platforms. A 360 video ‘sneak peek’ has also been available in various forms, including the iOS and Android Baobab app.
Today, the full version of Asteroids! is available for free across several platforms. The best experience can be found on Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows Mixed Reality devices, where the animation is rendered in real-time 3D. Sadly, unlike their first short, Asteroids! is not currently available on PSVR, HTC Vive, or Oculus Rift, despite its considerably more interactive design.
Invasion! was the team’s first foray into VR animation, and was a polished experience, but ended all too quickly. It was later slightly extended with an intro narrated by Ethan Hawke, but this felt like an afterthought, and didn’t offer the viewer what was really needed—more time with the characters. Asteroids! is a major improvement, being longer, with more complex animation and now interactivity.
“Different storytelling mediums all have a common goal—to tell great stories through characters that audiences connect with, care about, and maybe even come to love,” Baobab writes on their official site. “The great challenge and great potential for VR storytelling is not simply to achieve this goal, but also, to do it in a way that actually lets the viewer become a part of the story. With Asteroids!, this is a step towards achieving this goal.”
Follow these links to download the Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows Mixed Reality real-time versions. The non-interactive 360 video version of the full short can be viewed via YouTube 360 and Facebook 360, or via the Baobab app for iOS and Android (which also supports the Cardboard VR viewer), but for the reasons above, it is strongly recommended to experience one of the real-time versions first.
Baobab Studios is one of the largest independent VR film studios, having raised a total of $31 million in funding to date, most notably a $25 million Series B funding round in 2016 which also welcomed Larry Cutler (ex Dreamworks and Pixar) as CTO. Their current project, Rainbow Crow, an adaptation of a Lenape Native American tale, is their most ambitious, presented in several chapters, and features musician John Legend.
Wir kündigten bereits im Oktober den Eintritt des Animationsstudios Pixar in die VR-Branche an. Nun ist die Coco VR – die soziale VR-Erfahrung zum gleichnamigen Animationsfilm – offiziell für Oculus Rift im Oculus Store erschienen. Zeitgleich zum amerikanischen Kinostart von Coco – Lebendiger als das Leben! am 22. November folgt die Veröffentlichung der Mobile-Version für die Gear VR.
Coco VR für Oculus Rift veröffentlicht
Disney-Pixar arbeitete für Coco VR mit Oculus und Magnopus zusammen, um die soziale VR-Erfahrung zu entwickeln. Der Zusammenschluss von Disney und Oculus dient zwar hauptsächlich dazu, Promo-Aktionen zu großen Filmtiteln zu realisieren. Sie brachte jedoch ebenso interessante Entwicklungen wie die Marvel Powers United VR hervor.
Seit gestern ist die Erfahrung Coco VR im Oculus Store erhältlich und ermöglicht die gemeinsame Nutzung mit bis zu vier Spielern gleichzeitig. Mit euren Freunden oder alleine taucht ihr in das Reich der Toten ein, um an ikonischen Schauplätzen des Films auf bekannte Charaktere zu treffen und interaktive Spielelemente zu nutzen. So kann man beispielsweise in Cecis Kostümladen verschiedene Outfits anprobieren, mit euren Freunden in einem Fotoautomat Selfies schießen oder mit Hector eure eigene Musicalnummer vortragen.
Neben den interaktiven Elementen lassen sich zudem herausgeschnittene Szenen und weitere Extras zum Film betrachten. Spoiler soll es angeblich nicht geben. Die soziale Erfahrung ist Pixars erster Schritt innerhalb der VR-Branche und soll laut den Verantwortlichen einerseits Interesse für den Film wecken, andererseits das Eintauchen in die einzigartige Fantasiewelt ermöglichen.
In verschiedenen Disney-Läden wurden bereits vor dem offiziellen Kinostart Stationen mit einer Oculus Rift aufgebaut, um die VR-Erfahrung vor Ort auszutesten. Zudem wurde Coco VR bereits auf verschiedenen Veranstaltungen wie dem Día de los Muertos Festival in Amerika vorgeführt.
Coco VR für Oculus Riftist ab sofort kostenlos im Oculus Store erhältlich. Die Mobile-Version für Gear VRerscheint gleichzeitig zum amerikanischen Filmstart am 22. November. Der Film Coco – Lebendiger als das Leben! kommt am 30. November 2017 in die deutschen Kinos.
Coco VR is now available on Rift and you can visit the afterlife from Pixar’s latest film on Nov. 22 with Gear VR.
The social experience allows up to four people to party up with Rifts (or two people with Gear VR) and journey through the Land of the Dead modeling outfits, performing and decorating your skull. The virtual world is the latest in an ongoing collaboration between Disney and Facebook’s Oculus, which partners up with various developers to deliver high-quality promotional VR experiences for major movies. A previous team-up between Disney and Oculus produced a dress rehearsal for one of Beauty and The Beast’s most memorable songs. This latest creation is from LA-based studio Magnopus, which previously built the impressive Blade Runner: Memory Lab to promote Blade Runner 2049 in partnership with Oculus.
“The social, collaborative, social fun play was huge for us,” said Colum Slevin, Head of Experiences at Oculus. “It’s the first social experience my team has been involved in.”
This Coco VR experience is even coming to Rifts installed in select Disney stores and movie theaters ahead of the film’s release on Nov. 22, providing a new way for people to be introduced to both the film and VR headsets. According to Oculus, they will be holding firm to the 13 and over age guidance for wearing a VR headset, but kids can see what their parents are looking at on a nearby screen.
Representatives from Oculus and Pixar said there shouldn’t be any spoilers in the experience and that it could be good to view both before or after seeing the movie.
“The idea is to generate interest in the world and the film and see how inventive and magnificent that world is,” said Marc Sondheimer, Academy Award winning producer at Pixar.
Coco VR also includes unreleased footage, concept art and storyboards from the film. Disney also offers a Disney Movies VR app available on Steam but Coco VR is said to be available as a timed exclusive tied to Oculus marketplaces.
