Hulu quietly ended support for several VR platforms this week, including PlayStation VR, Oculus Go and Windows MR headsets. The only two headsets with continuing Hulu support, at the time of writing, are the Oculus Gear VR (not Quest) and Oculus Rift.
Bad news for VR users subscribed to Hulu – it looks like the streaming platform has started slowly winding down its supported VR platforms this week. As of June 17, users of now-unsupported VR headsets won’t be able to access and stream Hulu on their headsets anymore. As reported by Road to VR, Oculus Go, Windows MR, PlayStation VR, and Google Daydream all became unsupported platforms as of June 17, 2020, according to their respective Hulu help articles.
Oculus Rift and Oculus Gear VR remain the only VR platforms currently supported. Some of the platforms, such as Google Daydream, losing support may not come as a surprise. However it is a bit surprising to see the Gear VR remains supported while popular platforms such as PSVR and Oculus Go are left behind. That being said, there could be plans to drop Rift and Gear VR support in the near future as well, but hopefully not.
Unlike many other streaming services with international options, Hulu is only available in the United States and offers both streaming on demand and live TV streaming. Luckily, several other streaming services still have VR offerings, the biggest of which is, of course, Netflix. The VR app for Netflix is available across many VR headsets and puts you in a cozy winter cabin with a giant virtual TV screen for your viewing pleasure.
Will you miss Hulu on your VR headset? Let us know in the comments.
Baobab Studios, the developers behind Bonfire, Asteroids! and more, revealed that their next project is an immersive experience called ‘Baby Yaga’. A first look will be unveiled at the 2020 Annecy International Animation Festival Online in a few weeks.
Baba Yaga will be co-directed by the studio’s Co-Founder Eric Darnell and French director Mathias Chelebourg. The experience will be “a contemporary portrayal of the Eastern European legend inspired by illustrative 2D pop-up animation, hand-drawn and stop-motion styles.”
A few details of Baba Yaga’s narrative can be found on the Baobab Studios site:
It’s up to you and your sister Magda, to save your mother by entering the forest to obtain the cure from the enigmatic witch, Baba Yaga. Your choices define how this story of love and magic ends.
Due to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, Annecy is one of many festivals and events to move to an online format this year. Accredited festival viewers will be able to watch a ‘Work In Progress’ presentation on Baby Yaga, which will be available for the entire two-week event starting from June 15. A live Q&A with the Baobab Studios team will also take place on June 23rd at 9am PST.
We were big fans of Baobab’s last offering, Bonfire, which starred comedian Ali Wong and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. As Jamie noted in his Bonfire review, Baobab’s learned a lot from each of their productions, getting better and better every time. We can’t wait to see what they’ve got in store next.
Baobab Studios says Baba Yaga will premiere later this year, in ‘multiple formats’.
Gloomy Eyes released a few months ago for PC VR, but has now made its way across to the Oculus Quest. The immersive story is split across three episodes, supports hand tracking and runs for somewhere around 30 minutes. Here’s our quick review.
Gloomy Eyes had a fair amount of buzz around it before release. Colin Farrell signed on to narrate and then the project won the Artistic Achievement and Audio Achievement awards at the 2019 Raindance Immersive Awards. The film was shown at distinguished film events such as the Sundance 2019 festival and the South by Southwest 2019 festival, among others. Now, Gloomy Eyes has made its standalone VR debut on the Oculus Quest.
The story is set in a world that has been overcome by darkness and follows a zombie boy named Gloomy as he falls in love with a mortal girl, Nena. In terms of animation and artistic direction, Gloomy Eyes is absolutely stunning. It feels very Tim Burton, but with even more fluid animations and intricate design. Every scene is a wonder to look at — everything is designed with care and such a high level of detail. At certain points in the story, the experience can feel quite magical.
Most of the scenes are presented almost like dioramas, floating in the darkness and only illuminated by a fireplace or other small sources of light. As the characters move around the environment and the scenes change, you’ll be naturally guided to turn to where the next diorama is about to appear. However, some of the scenes and set pieces are so stunning that you’ll wish you could pause the action and just spend a few minutes investigating everything up close.
It’s an immersive, 6DoF experience that works seamlessly most of the time. One scene in particular, involving theme park rides in episode two, makes excellent use of the VR medium and 3D space. It’s a dazzling presentation with beautiful trails of light and models moving fluidly all around you in a manner that you could only experience in VR.
In terms of story, I have mixed feelings. The world that the story is set in is intriguing and the characters are all very charming, but the actual narrative has a strange feel and pacing. While Colin Farrell has a fantastic voice for narration, sometimes his lines feel a bit redundant. Occasionally it feels warranted and used well, especially when world building and setting up necessary exposition. However many other lines fall into the classic writing trap of telling the audience something that is either already being demonstrated by the characters or could be, very easily.
The pacing of the narrative also feels off, mainly due to how the story is split across three episodes. The first episode is noticeably shorter and only really exists to set up the context and exposition for the other two episodes, where the story really begins. The second and third episodes are almost equal to each other in length, and feature more interesting set pieces, plot points and better narrative structure, since all of the boring groundwork was dumped in the first episode.
It’s a strange decision to compartmentalize the story into ‘episodes’, with each one taking you back to the main menu after it finishes. One large story, with several auto-save checkpoints, would probably have helped avoid the strange narrative pacing. Nonetheless, despite the minor gripes, it’s still an enjoyable narrative and the animation and visual design keep you enthralled throughout.
It’s also important to note while playing on the Oculus Quest, you may get some minor blur and ghosting when moving, which can be distracting. This is, sadly, an unavoidable result of displaying such dark content with pockets of light on the Quest’s OLED screen. Upon comparing the PC VR version of the title (via Oculus Link) and the native Quest version, there may also be some minor graphic downgrades on the latter to accommodate for the standalone system, but they’re not overly noticeable or important.
The Quest version also technically supports hand tracking, but the experience isn’t interactive at all. Using your hands amounts solely to selecting a language and an episode while in the menu, and nothing else. It’s definitely still a plus, but also not a game changer.
Overall, the few minor gripes shouldn’t take away from just how captivating Gloomy Eyes is. It masterfully commands a mysterious yet gorgeous art style and pairs it with brilliant animation. The level of detail is so high, and the world so beautiful, that I can see myself revisiting the experience more than once, just to get a better look at things. People of all ages, even with little VR experience, should enjoy Gloomy Eyes, and it’s short enough that they may as well give it a try.
Gloomy Eyes is available on Steam,Viveport and the Oculus Store for PC VR and on the Oculus Store for Quest. This review was conducted on the Oculus Quest primarily, supplemented by the Rift version using Oculus Link for comparison.
Perhaps noproject to date shows the potential of Quill—Oculus’ VR illustration and animation tool—quite like The Remedy. Created by veteran animator Daniel Martin Peixe, The Remedy is a roughly 10 minute long story which establishes a very effective comic book-like experience by stringing together various Quill scenes to tell a complete narrative. Peixie shared with us a glimpse inside of the production process which brought the film to life.
Guest Article by Daniel Martin Peixe
Daniel Martin Peixe is a character animator and illustrator at Walt Disney Animation Studios. With twenty years of experience in 2D and CGI animation, his recent work can be seen in critically-acclaimed films like Tangled (2010), Zootopia (2016), and Moana (2016). Peixe has been a mentor for the professional online animation workshop Animsquad since 2017. He is the writer, director, and creator of the VR short film The Remedy (2019), created entirely within the Quill VR illustration tool.
How to Watch The Remedy
If you haven’t had a chance to watch ‘The Remedy’, we recommend doing so for context. The short is available in Quill Theater on Oculus Quest, here’s how to find it:
Ensure your Oculus Quest is running firmware 12.0 or later
In Oculus TV, you’ll find ‘The Remedy’ under “An animated Story Created in Quill”.
The Remedy project started with the idea of using Quill illustrations as if they were comic book panels. Looking at my own Quill illustrations, I kept thinking, ‘I wish I could press a button and see what happens next!’ I also wanted to experiment using traditional cinema editing in VR, mostly for action scenes. I pitched this idea to the Quill team and to my surprise they were already thinking of ways to expand the timeline toolset in the next update, aiming to make Quill a full fledged VR storytelling suite!
Soon after, I was officially commissioned to work on this project—a short story in VR using the latest Quill 2.0 beta with the timeline tools—I was over the Moon! It was an amazing learning experience; this turned out to be my rough production workflow, which I’ll talk about in more detail below:
Pre-production
Script writing
Rough storyboard thumbnails in 2D
3D storyboarding with in VR, layout and staging
Editing storyboards in VR, using transitions, cuts and adjusting timing
Organizing layers and labeling each one
Adding ‘stops’
Sending the rough assembly to the Music and Audio team
Production
Visual development, research reference photos
Final in-film text dialogue rendered in Photoshop and exported as PNG
2D color reference sketches before painting key scenes in VR
Drawn and build sets and characters, speech bubbles and panels in VR
Frame by frame animation
Adjust final timing and transitions
Adding special animated effects
Send to Music and Audio team
Final audio mix
Optimization pass
Technical checks for Quill Theater playback on Oculus Quest
As I started writing the story, I focused on something simple with a minimal number of characters. Also, I knew I wanted exciting action scenes but before writing those I tried to make sure there’s an emotional connection with the main character and clear motivations for the heroine to go on an adventure.
I did many different drafts of the script until I landed with something I was happy with and moved on to storyboarding. Some storyboards started as 2D sketches I did on my phone; the small screen allowed me to quickly put down any ideas I had for camera angles, scene staging etc. With these little scribbles as a reference, it was much easier later to do the VR sketching in Quill.
Preliminary 2D Sketches
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During this process it was important to start establishing the scale of the scenes in relation to the viewer, as well as the staging and planning for the ‘focal point’ of each scene to make sure that when there’s a ‘cut’ people don’t get lost or disoriented. I wanted the audience to be their own ‘cameraman’ in some scenes, like the one where the wagon leaves the house and you see the title. Planning all this with rough sketches was crucial, to make sure that some of the more experimental scenes would work before I jumped in and began modeling the assets.
The transform keys in Quill allow you to create smooth animations and fade in and outs, setting a couple of keyframes on the group layers. This was super useful for adding ‘camera moves’ which I did by moving entire sets instead of moving the actual Quill camera. Like the ‘escape from the volcano’ scene where the character is on a static layer animated jumping from one platform to the other and the set moves toward the audience, giving the impression that the audience is moving forward.
The ‘stops’ (where viewer input is required to continue the story) were a new concept that we weren’t sure that would work, but I had the feeling that it would make it feel more like a comic book where viewers could take in the scene around them before continuing.
Picking where to put the stops was a natural choice in some cases, for example, the establishing shot where the heroine is in front of the volcano temple entrance. The audience might feel like spending a bit more time taking in the environment. Just like a double page in a comic book, it is a big featured moment, and you are invited to explore all the details until you’re ready to move on. In other cases the stops are helpful in case you want to spend more time reading the speech bubbles. And then in other cases I chose to not have any stop or pause, because I wanted the audience to feel the thrill of the action.
Once all the story scenes were sketched out I adjusted the timing and made sure I was happy with that because it was time to deliver the project to the audio and music team so they could get started.
The next step for me was cleaning up scene by scene and adding the color, details etc. For the key scenes I did a 2D color key sketch outside of VR. That was super helpful in order to establish a clear goal for the scene in terms of mood, color palette, and lighting.
2D Color Keys
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While most of the scenes in The Remedy are viewed from a third-person perspective, there were several scenes which I thought would be especially powerful in first-person. Thanks to VR, that perspective truly puts the audience in the shoes of the character. The ‘book’ scene—where the main character pages through an old book that sets up some important elements of the story—was important to me because being in a first person view it acts as a close-up shot, and the audience is welcome to lean in closer to explore the details of the book. In the ‘plant temple’ scene—where the main character finds the objective of her quest—I used first-person so that the audience could feel the same as the protagonist, admiring all the magical healing plants still growing on that orchard, and the sense of awe exploring how big is the temple. At the very end I included another first-person scene where I put the audience in the skin of the bad guy, looking up at the heroine as she holds onto the satchel—and his fate. Many of these shots would also work in 2D cinema, but in VR they become much more impactful!
When modelling assets I tried to keep an eye to the stroke count and the general density of the detail, since I knew there could be a chance for this project to run on Oculus Quest. Using the straight line tool as a base for most structures was the way to go. And also being smart about where to add detail and where to leave things more simplified. In most scenes there isn’t even a set or background, just the characters and a color gradient. This was completely intentional since I wanted the audience to focus on them and not be distracted by detail in the background.
I knew that I wanted most of the animation to be simple from the start. I didn’t plan to do full animation for this project, but I realized the action scenes needed some extra detail to really sell them. The most complex animations were achieved with a rough sketch first, with the timing and most in-betweens drawn.
Then I posed the character by constructing it from separate, previously drawn parts. I grabbed each part, and using the rough anim as a guide, I positioned them on each frame.
This allows for a very traditional animation approach, and with the use of Grab tool I was able to duplicate and deform the pieces seamlessly. The animation also becomes layered or what was known as ‘limited’ animation in certain parts, meaning that I would divide the character and while some parts of the character are still moving other parts remain still, on a separate layer.
The whole team at Oculus became really excited to learn that The Remedy, would be playable on Quest! The Quill team lead engineer was able to squeeze the whole project into a small size, and he ran some extra optimizations to make sure it would play well.
The last stretch of work was very exciting because we started to hear the amazing musical score from Facebook’s sound designer coming to life. Due to the ‘stops’ feature, sound engineers had to come up with two types of scores: the first was timed with an average guess of the time it takes to read the speech bubbles and to progress through the story—that way if you wait for too long in a paused moment, the music continues and slowly fades into the atmosphere sound effect—the second type of score was for the more linear moments with a fixed timing.
As I was finishing the last scenes, sound design was catching up with me finishing up the music. The team did an incredible job with the sound effects that make everything feel much more grounded.
This has been an amazing learning experience. I wore many hats and learned a lot in terms of storytelling, visual development, color, writing, and staging. But also huge learning in how to make the most out of Quill’s amazing toolset. I loved working on The Remedy and I cannot wait to create my next VR film with Quill!
At least, he doesn’t appear as such when I find him battling jet lag atop an offensively pink pillow just a stroll along from central London’s Southbank Centre. His long hair is neatly tied back in a bun and he rests his crossed arms on his knees as if ready to dive into impromptu meditation at a moment’s notice. Between stifled yawns from an early morning flight from Barcelona, he seems generally amiss on his first day at the Raindance Film Festival.
At first sight, it’s not what I expected from the co-director of Battlescar (seen below in our VR Culture Show). It’s a searing, explosive VR feature that thrusts you into the disgruntled spirit of the late 1970’s New York punk scene. Blink and you’ll miss it, and you’ll get no apologies from its creators.
“Actually, the first episode [of Battlescar] the producers were like “this is too fast, people need more time to see the scenarios,”” he says. “And Nico and I were like “Actually all the VR is very boring because it’s very slow.””
Well, that’s a bit more like it.
In Allais’ defense, Battlescar, which he created alongside longtime friend Nico Casavecchia, does give a lot of other VR experiences the appearance of having training wheels. Despite its lengthy 30 minute run time, it’s relentlessly paced, barely letting a minute pass before radically switching up storytelling styles. The plot follows Lupe, a young Puerto Rican-American voiced by Rosario Dawson who happens upon the ferocious Debbie while flirting with a New York jail cell. Taken under her wing, Lupe bonds with Debbie over disillusionment and outrage as they plot to bring their plight to the stage with the repetitive thud of punk rock musiv. An assortment of misadventures befalls them along the way.
“We started seeing VR films out there and VR experiences and we’re like trying what we didn’t like of them and how we can do the film we want to see in VR,” Allais explains. “It was a very personal process because there’s nothing written really in VR language, so you can do everything at the same time.”
It’s that kitchen sink delivery that makes Battlescar sing louder than its screechy-voiced soundtrack. No two instances are the same, be it a fleeting ride on the back of a motorcycle in which you long for the wind to bite into your face, or the dizzying clashing of drums and ideas from all angles as Lupe’s frustrated words flow from mind to page. “I just wanted to come with ideas like what we think should be the experience of getting in a headset,” Allais explains. “So that’s Battlescar for us, a big playground of exploration and ideas. Narrative, framing, and I think pretty much everything that we came up with ended in the film.”
Despite Allais’ earlier dismissal, there are traces of VR’s past, like the hints of Dear Angelica in its readiness to tinker with scale. But it’s otherwise blisteringly fresh; a collection of revelatory discoveries just waiting to be made. One minute Debbie has an enormous gun held to her head with terrifying proximity, the next her and Lupe are leap-frogging their way home like a level in Super Mario Bros.. In fact, Allais tells me he and Casavecchia eventually stopped watching other VR experiences to maintain their own ideas. One guiding star was particularly crucial; no interactivity.
“When we started playing with VR, we wanted to create a piece that wasn’t interactive, but at the same time used the space in an interactive and playful way,” he says
Simply put, there isn’t time for interactivity in Battlescar. There are no moments to linger; to lean in and wonder if you can pick up the drum stick resting on the desk or strum the guitar sitting next to you. This isn’t a world, it’s a slideshow, kicked and bashed together to demand the viewer’s attention at all times. Without this urgency, Allais suspects it wouldn’t be half as engaging.
“Because you don’t have a director’s point of view that shows you how to go from one place to the other,” he says. “So what we wanted to do is just the opposite. If people want to see more they need to see it again.”
I won’t go on much longer, suffice to say I truly loved Battlescar. It was an experience that reenergized my love of narrative-driven VR and brought me back to the infantile excitement of seeing this technology with fresh eyes. I can’t wait to see what the pair does next.
“Now we’re more into coming back to some of those techniques and developing them more,” Allais teases. @[Battlescar] is like this mash-up of different techniques and ways of storytelling and they need to be developed. And that’s what we want to do hopefully in the following story.”
Sign me up.
Battlescar is planned for release on home headsets in the near future.
Facebook today announced and launched Quill 2.0, bringing overhauled VR animation, audio, and narrative tools to make the app an all-in-one pipeline for storyboarding, drawing, animating, and storytelling.
When Oculus first launched Quill back in 2016, it was a powerful ‘VR drawing’ app with features like a layer system, brush styles & opacities, exporting, and video capturing functionality. But an update which brought animation tools to the app turned it into much, much more. Over the years (and now officially under Facebook’s purview) the app has increasingly become focused on VR drawing, animation, and audio.
Today Quill 2.0 brings a host of improvements to further mature the app into a “self-contained storytelling tool,” says Quill‘s lead engineer, Sebastien Chervrel.
Storytellers are often forced to switch between tools at various steps in the narrative process. A typical project might include storyboarding, modeling, surfacing, rigging, lighting, and all kinds of rendering, each with their own specialized tool. With Quill’s new Animation Timeline feature, storytellers can sequence narratives, synchronize animations to sound, create transitions between shots, and much more. Storytellers now have everything they need to create long-form VR narratives, all in one tool.
Quill also saves time and resources by avoiding file transferring and the need to learn new software. Most importantly, it lets storytellers go from initial concept to finished project in the most efficient and accurate way possible. In traditional animation pipelines, things can often get lost in translation with each step of the production process. This happens as subsequent steps become increasingly abstracted over time. With Quill 2.0, the concept becomes the finished piece as storyboards seamlessly transform into final animation.
Oculus says that Quill’s animation features have been vastly upgraded with keyframe transform tools, making it easier to move complex objects with keyframes and automatic interpolation, rather than frame-by-frame animation.
Quill 2.0 also introduces ‘Stops’ into its animation tools, which gives storytellers a way to pause the scene at key moments so that viewers can indefinitely see the action up close until they choose to proceed, enabling ‘page-turning’ and ‘comic book’-like narrative creations.
Additionally, 2.0 has enhanced spatial audio tools which allow creators to define the position, direction, and area of sounds inside their creation. The sound volumes can also be animated along with everything else, allowing animators to pair moving objects with moving sound.
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Quill is available free to any Rift users who also activate Oculus Touch. Quill artwork can be shared and viewed immersively in the app itself and in Facebook Spaces. While the company has said they’re working to bring Quillartwork to Quest, they haven’t announced plans to bring the actual creation app to the headset (likely due to performance considerations).
Computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles featured a series of VR and AR-related projects premiering at the event.
New optical designs for AR headsets from NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2019.
The long-running conference serves as a yearly showcase of research, tools and art focused around the field of computer graphics. SIGGRAPH was held from July 28 to Aug. 1 at the Los Angeles Convention Center with an immersive pavilion featuring an arcade, museum and a village of mixed reality installations. There’s also exhibition space and presentation areas where emerging technologies are discussed and shared, as well as a VR Theater hosted as part of the event.
We saw A Kite’s Tale from long-time Disney visual effects artist and VR enthusiast Bruce Wright premiering in the theater alongside other new productions like Doctor Who: The Runaway. There’s more exploratory research at SIGGRAPH too and art-focused works from students and universities.
You can check out our 39-minute walk through the conference here:
Here are a few projects that caught our eye at SIGGRAPH 2019:
Prescription and Foveated AR
NVIDIA researchers presented two kinds of AR displays at SIGGRAPH 2019. One display accounts for the wearer’s prescription with its optics and the other moves elements in connection with gaze tracking.
The Prescription AR system is “a 5mm-thick prescription-embedded AR display based on a free-form image combiner,” according to the abstract. “A plastic prescription lens corrects viewer’s vision while a half-mirror-coated free-form image combiner located delivers an augmented image located at the fixed focal depth (1 m).”
The Foveated AR system is “a near-eye AR display with resolution and focal depth dynamically driven by gaze tracking. The display combines a traveling microdisplay relayed off a concave half-mirror magnifier for the high-resolution foveal region, with a wide FOV peripheral display using a projector-based Maxwellian-view display whose nodal point is translated to follow the viewer’s pupil during eye movements using a traveling holographic optical element (HOE).”
The foveated system uses an “infrared camera” to track eye movement and drive the optics directly in front of the eyeball. “Our display supports accommodation cues by varying the focal depth of the microdisplay in the foveal region, and by rendering simulated defocus on the ‘always in focus’ scanning laser projector used for peripheral display.”
Anthropomorphic Tail
Arque is eye-catching work from the Embodied Media Project at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design in Japan which proposes “an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail to allow us to alter our body momentum for assistive, and haptic feedback applications.”
The tail’s structure is “driven by four pneumatic artificial muscles providing the actuation mechanism for the tail tip” and, according to the abstract for the project submitted to SIGGRAPH’s emerging technologies, it highlights what such a prosthetic tail could do “as an extension of human body to provide active momentum alteration in balancing situations, or as a device to alter body momentum for full-body haptic feedback scenarios.”
Ollie VR Animation Tool
Ollie is a new VR animation tool designed for intuitive creation in VR that’ll be shown at SIGGRAPH.
We’ve seen tools like Quill, Tvori and Mindshow used for VR-based animations, but Ollie focuses on a notebook-like interface with “motion paths and keyframes visualized spatially, automatic easing, and automatic squash and stretch” meant to make it easier for first time animators to create something. The app’s creators tell me they should have the entire app running on Oculus Quest to show at SIGGRAPH.
LiquidMask
This project from Taipei Tech’s Department of Interaction Design pumps liquid into a VR headset to provide tactile sensations. “Filling liquid in the water pipe as a transmission interface, this system can simultaneously produce thermal changes and vibration responses on the face skin of the users,” according to the project’s description.
This post was originally published on July 16 and updated with videos from the conference on August 8.
You have to admire Baobab at least for its persistence if nothing else. Its ever-growing catalog of endearing VR animations has a throughline of progression, each feeling more assured in immersive storytelling than the last. Its latest experience, Bonfire, makes similarly significant strides in promising new directions.
Interaction is at the heart of Bonfire, and it yields potent results. You embody a scout sent to a distant alien planet to investigate potential colonization. After a rough landing, you’re forced to take shelter around a fire with your AI companion, Debbie (joyfully played by Ali Wong). There, dimly lit in the gentle flames, you’re treated to a close encounter with one of the planet’s inhabitants.
Fans of Baobab’s past work will find themselves right at home amongst the tongue-in-cheek tone, fantastical score and splendid visuals. But Bonfire has its roots in work beyond the studio, harkening back to early introductory VR like Oculus’ Farlands demo. In some senses, this too feels like a technical showcase, laying the groundwork for further adventures to come. There are sparks of invention all the same; playing a game of fetch with your new alien friend brings a few minutes of virtual delight, as does trying to tempt them into snatching a marshmallow from your hands.
It’s the narrative’s sharpness, both in scripting and pacing, that keeps a smile on the face. Bonfire has wit in both speech and action. You’ll find it in Wong’s lines, delivered with an enthusiastic naivety as she serves you cricket-flavored rations. But it’s also in the punchy animation, that stops and starts at an erratic tempo, giving the piece an unpredictable edge. It helps, too, that audience participation is an essential ingredient in the narrative.
There’s more work to be done, though. Interactions here are charming to no end but also feel somewhat limited in scope. Bonfire is brilliant but brief, and I wanted to explore more of the world around me and spend more time with the friends I’d made.
Bonfire exposes Baobab to a world of deeper storytelling possibilities, then. With that comes huge technical challenge, the kind we’re only just starting to see overcome in other experiences. For Boabab, it’s a promising start in a new era. Where it goes from here will be the real story.
Disney has shown off an internal tool for posing and animating 3D models from inside VR. Called PoseVR, the tool is an experimental project exploring the potential of VR for 3D creation. Disney has not indicated that this will be released or even further developed.
Disney describes the tool as:
Removing inefficiency and distractions to allow artists to focus on their craft is one of our core tenets that drives innovation. PoseVR is an experimental project established to demonstrate the potential of VR as a tool to pose and animate CG characters.
A multidisciplinary team composed of engineers and animators developed and tested PoseVR to invent a functioning, posable rig in VR and to test assumptions on design and workflow. This informed us how to expand our current workflows while also showing the benefits and potential of VR for our future animation toolsets.
Animation was also a core focus of MARUI’s VR plugins for Maya and Blender. Using your hands to directly manipulate parts of the model that should move can be far more intuitive than the current approach of trying to move and rotate elements in 3D space with a mouse & keyboard.
Companies across the 3D creation industry are coming to the same conclusion: VR is perfectly suited for animation. While this tool isn’t being released publicly, we expect many like it to emerge in the coming years. This is a workflow which VR will almost certainly disrupt.
As a current artist-in-residence on the Facebook Social VR team, Goro Fujita has been making some pretty impressive “quillistrations” as a part of his daily creative regime using Quill, Oculus’ first-party VR paint and drawing tool that he helped develop. In a few of his latest creations though, Fujita has been plumbing the possibilities of bringing comics to life in VR. As Fujita puts it, he’s now convinced “VR comics will be a thing.”
Taking inspiration from the Dragon Ball manga, Fujita recently recreated the iconic moment when Piccolo sacrifices himself for Gohan, the eldest son of series protagonist Goku. The animation effects lend the work a decidedly more manga-like feel than anime per se, something Fujita calls “manime.”
First, the original inspiration for Fujita’s quillistration:
Image courtesy of Akira Toriyama
Now for Fujita’s interpretation—you can check it out for yourself in Facebook Spaces, the company’s social VR app that lets you chat, share 360 photo and video, and now Quill projects too.
In a tweet, Fujita maintains the VR illustration is “more like a proof of concept,” and that he doesn’t currently have plans to produce any VR versions of branded manga like Dragon Ball at this time, as he prefers to make his own original content. He says however designing the scene in VR allowed him to create it more quickly than any medium he’s experimented with thus far.
“Something clicked when I drew Spiderman yesterday and I wanted to spend a bit more time into a daily painting. I took a Dragonball page and did my VR interpretation for it. That key moment that made me love Piccolo! How rewarding this experiment was! I would totally read comics like this! Quill comics will become a thing!”
As a former visual development artist at Dreamworks, Fujita is credited for his work on films such as Megamind (2010), Madagascar 3 (2012), Penguins of Madagascar (2014), and Boss Baby (2017). Fujita joined the now shuttered Oculus Story Studio as art director in 2014, and then moved onto his position as artist-in-residence when Quill’s development was picked up by Facebook’s Social VR team.
Fujita shares Quill content most days via his Twitter, and hosts a monthly livestream teaching session for backers of his Patreon.
While virtual stalwart Fujita isn’t the first to hit on the idea of creating manga exclusively for VR headsets—Square Enix recently released a long-term manga project called Tales of Wedding Rings VR (2018), and last month MyDearest’s VR manga game TOKYO CHRONOS reached its Kickstarter funding goal—he makes a strong case for the burgeoning genre. With the right understanding of the tools (in this case Quill), a single developer can quickly create a VR comic without the need of voice actors, and without having to master a game engine.
For aspiring VR comic creators, Fujita offers a quick look behind the scenes of how he created the Dragon Ball scene:
