Tag: Oculus Rift

Oculus VR came, in a manner of speaking, a full circle with this Year’s Sundance Film Festival, which is currently taking place in Park City, Utah, and ends on February 1st, 2015.

In 2012, journalist Nonny de la Peña showed (what was then) her latest journey in what she calls “immersive journalism”, Hunger in Los Angeles. The film utilised a head-mounted display unit developed by a 19-year-old student. So convinced was that student of the potential for VR, he started putting together ideas for a commercial, low-cost headset. A kickstarter campaign followed  and … yes, you’ve guessed it, I’m talking about Palmer Luckey.

This year, Oculus VR are back at Sundance, in the form of their new in-house film studio, Story Studio, which is showcasing the first of five animated short films the company plans to make under the Story Studio banner over the course of the next year.

Located in San Francisco, Story Studio numbers around dozen film industry veterans from the likes of Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic under the leadership of Saschka Unseld, formally of Pixar. The company started to come together around a year ago, although as Josh Constine notes over at Techcrunch, the idea for the studio was already on the Oculus VR roadmap from the earliest days. Indeed, the very potential for VR in films as indicated by Oculus VR in their plans, many have been one of the added attractions for Zuckerberg in acquiring the company.

Certainly, Oculus VR’s CEO, Brendan Iribe is in no doubt that Facebook has been crucial in accelerating the film plans, noting to Constine, “this is another example where as a smaller, independent start-up it would have been hard to spin up an effort like this.”

Lost, the title of Story Studio’s short, runs at between 4 and 10 minutes, the length being determined by the level of engagement in the film and what the decide to explore within it. As such, it is said to be a powerful demonstration of the added depth that VR can bring to a film. It is being shown in the Festival’s New Frontier programme, which this years see no fewer than 11 of the 14 submissions attempt to utilise VR.

Not all of them succeed, as Casey Newton and Bryan Bishop, writing in The Verge note. Some mange to do exactly the reverse, and demonstrate the inherent weaknesses in VR if not used correctly, and the need to learn entirely new approach to filming, interaction and editing in order to properly create and maintain the desired level of immersion needed to make the use VR worthwhile.

It is because VR as a medium is so difficult a concept to grasp and successfully integrate into film-making that drove Oculus VR to create and develop Story Studio, as Iribe notes in a conversation with The Road to VR’s Ben Lang.

“When we started to show people [the Oculus Rift] in Hollywood, their question was ‘how do we get started?’… We said ‘you pick up these gaming tools like Unity or Unreal and you start making something’ but that’s not natural for [cinema creatives],” Iribe said. “Right now the focus is to support and inspire the community—share with them everything we’re doing, opening it all up. Over the next two months, we’re hoping to educate the community on how we did this and how we got started. We still have a ways to go before people are making longer film experiences.”

Unseld picks-up on this line while talking to Techcrunch’s Constine alongside of Iribe.

“Everyone who starts a project in VR encounters the same things in the beginning,” he states. “They try to figure out ‘How do I make these things I know from film work in VR? How do I do a cut in VR?’ The resounding answer is that porting film concepts straight to VR just doesn’t work.”

Thus, Story Studio will be a studio in both senses of the word. Not only will it be a engine for producing a series of short animated stories over the courses of the next year, it will also be something of a “open-source” VR cinematography “school” presenting and sharing insights into the use of VR in films, offering examples of how the technology works or doesn’t work within the framework of a film, and so on.

This is actually a clever move, as it allows Story Studio to both offer a roadmap on how other studios might involve themselves in VR and present them with the kind of finished product which can be seen to work, both technically and with audiences, thus giving them something they can understand, replicate and even enhance as the technology matures.

Of course, all this will also be helped by actually having the technology – the headset itself – actually available to use by more than a few thousand people world-wide. And even here Story Studio may offer a small clue as to when the consumer version of the Oculus Rift might appear.

According to Reuters, via Fortune On-line, Lost is the first of five animated shorts Story Studio plan to produce over the next year. Furthermore, The Guardian suggests that all five will be released “in the run-up” to the release of the commercial version of the headset – which Iribe refers to as “Oculus Rift CV1”, while Iribe himself, when talking to Ben Lang, says all five films will be available for the CV1 product.So perhaps one way of counting down the time to the release of the commercial headset is to count off the Story Studio films as they appear…

Related Links

• Oculus’ Pixar Exec-Led Story Studio Will Release VR Cinema Examples – Techcrunch
• Oculus Internal ‘Story Studio’ Draws Pixar Talent, Experiments with CG Cinematic VR – The Road to VR
• Facebook’s Oculus Forms In-house Virtual Reality Film Studio – Fortune On-line
• Facebook’s Oculus VR Sets up Story Studio to Make Virtual Reality Films – The Guardian
• How virtual reality ate the Sundance Film Festival – The Verge

As is to be expected, Oculus VR are attending the International Consumer Electronics Show 2015, which is once again being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, through until January 9th, 2015, where the latest headset prototype  – Crescent Bay  – is undergoing its “public debut”, and the company’s CEO, Brendan Iribe took time out to discuss the prototype and more with Techcrunch’s Darrell Etherington.

“Crescent Bay is a huge leap from Oculus Rift DK2,” Iribe informs Etherington at the start of their 6-minute discussion. “And it increases all the different parts, whether it’s resolution, precision, the positional tracking, the latency, the optics themselves, everything really takes a big jump, and it really finally delivers what we’ve been talking about for a long time, this pursuit of presence. It finally delivers on that presence that we feel is good enough for consumers.”

So, does that mean he’s revising his comment at November’s Web summit conference about the consumer version of the headset being “many months” away?

Well, probably not. While no outright statement on time frames is given, it’s fair to say the the company is still putting a consumer release as some way down the road.

For one thing, the next immediate target is getting an audio SDK to developers to allow them to get to grips with the capabilities of Crescent Bay’s 3D immersive audio system. However, it’s liable to be another “few months” before that happens. For another, while the company feel they are now “close” to having a headset that is, technology-wise, to being consumer-ready, Iribe also notes the audio is at a “minimum” the company requires of a consumer product, and also that no decision on what they’ll actually be shipping as a consumer product as yet been made: it might be “just” the headset, or it might be the headset and an input system / device.

When speaking to Peter Rubin at the Web Summit in Dublin in November (linked to above), Iribe made it clear that input had become a “big focus” for the company, which they were “R&Ding”. He restates part of this to Etherington, which suggests they may still be leaning towards headset + input system / device, although he also noted that the company is not yet ready to discuss matters of input in public.

In terms of a suitable software library being available in time for any launch so – another consideration in determining when to launch the consumer product – Iribe indicates the company is “very happy” with the progress that is being made, suggesting this is less of a concern as they gradually move towards a consumer release.

Continue reading “Oculus VR: of debuts and acquisitions” →

Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus VR was at the Web Summit event in Dublin Ireland at the start of November, where he sat down for a conversation with Wired’s Peter Rubin to discuss the latest state of play about the Oculus Rift, VR in general – and to deliver a small warning to others also involved in the headset market. He also indicated that the consumer version of Oculus Rift isn’t necessarily as close to reaching the market as some might think.

In terms of the Oculus Rift, he was upbeat about the latest prototype version, Crescent Bay, which appeared in September and which is said to be a “massive leap” forward in comparison to the Oculus DK2 hardware that shipped to developers in June and July.

Crescent Bay incorporates 360-degree positional head tracking through the inclusion of sensors on the back of the redesigned and improved head harness, higher resolution, wider field of view, a lighter body, and integrated audio (via Realspace 3D). Iribe said of the new prototype, “Crescent Bay is where it all begins: that quality level.”

However, he also cautioned against people getting too excited over thought that the Rift is just around the corner. “What can I say on that?” he replied to Peter Rubin’s enquiry as to when a consumer version might appear. He went on:

We want to get it right. We really do. We’ve gone out there and we’ve set this bar and said, “we are going to get it right, and we’re not going to ship until we get it right” … We’re getting very close … We want it to be a beautiful product; there’s no reason it can’t be a beautiful product … so we still have a way to go, and we’re still working on a number of things, but we’re getting much closer. We like to say it’s months, not necessarily years, away [but] it’s many months, not a few months.

He then continued, “Crescent Bay, I’ll go on the record as saying that hardware-wise for the headset, it’s arguably almost there for the consumer product, and now there’s a few other parts. So we are finalising the specifications for that consumer version, and the headset is largely finalised.”

Michael Bormann of Engadget tires-out the Crescent Bay Oculus Rift prototype

One of the issues remaining in the way of a launch doesn’t lie with the headset – it is squarely down to the suitability of input devices. Iribe notes that keyboard, game pads and even gesture devices aren’t ideal; there needs to be some form of visual element (e.g. seeing your hands), and there needs to be a tactile element as well. People need to be able to touch, feel, and sense a button reacting to being pressed.He went on to say:

We’re trying to focus now on is, what is that VR input? Where does VR input begin? We don’t know the final Holy Grail of VR input; we have kind-of any idea of VR vision being a pair of sunglasses, which we’d like to get to [but] VR input, we’re still R&Ding, we’re still looking at. But that’s definitely a big focus for us.

The implication of his comments, and those that follow an observation made somewhat in jest by Rubin suggest that Oculus VR may be looking to develop their own input device, or perhaps work in close partnership with another company in the development of an “Oculus ready” (my term, not Iribe’s) device. Certianly, having grown from employing just 50 people prior to Facebook acquiring them, to almost 250 personnel today, it is not inconceivable that Oculus VR may be poking at ideas for its own inpute device.

The subject of VR’s “killer application” also comes up in the conversation, and Iribe states he feels it is too early to really say, although he acknowledges it will initially have a big rooting in games and entertainment – hardly surprising, given the Rift’s pedigree. “There’ll be a market of a lot of really fun entertainment experiences in VR where you’ll feel like you’re in the game or in the movie, and it’s going to be awesome,” he said.

But in terms of going mainstream, he very much sees VR’s future hinging on communications:

For me, the real media where this is going to really transform the world long-term, is when we can have face-to-face communications…. Most people travel, and we get on airplanes and cars to go have face-to-face communications… If you could, in the future throw on a pair of sunglasses, and we can have that same conversation with people around the world, all feeling like you’re in the same place, face-to-face, looking at each other, looking at each other’s eyes, looking in each other’s mouths; we may look like funny little avatars, we may look a little more human… that’s really transformative.

Were this to happen, and VR offer the same ease of use and access to communications and information as the smartphone, Iribe is convinced it could have as deep an impact on the way we communicate as the mobile ‘phone itself. “To have virtual reality where you can have these face-to-face communications, that’s going to appeal to billions of people,” he said.

However, he also had a warning for other companies also trying to bring VR headsets to the market – there have already been at least two Oculus clones making waves (the ANTVR being one), with Sony also working on its Morpheus headset for the PS4. And that warning is: don’t launch until you’ve solved the problem of motion sickness. In giving the warning, Iribe seemed to be particularly focused on Sony.

We’re really looking forward to this as an industry, and looking forward to it being an industry that takes off… We’re really looking forward to more people jumping into the VR space, and we’re doing our best to be very open, supporting others. At the same time we’re a little worried about some of the bigger companies putting out product that isn’t quite ready. That elephant in the room is disorientation and motion sickness. That’s something I view as, two or three years from now, will really be behind us… We feel pretty confident that our consumer product will have solved that; and we’re really encouraging other companies, especially big companies, “don’t put out a product until you have solved that!”

To this end, Oculus VR’s openness on matter has been such that they’ve invited senior representatives from Sony to come and learn from the lessons the company gained from users’ experiences with the DK1 and the DK2 and to see the Crescent Bay prototype ahead of its launch, offering them the advice that they should “make sure your product is as good or close!”

Elsewhere in the interview, Iribe gives some fascinating insight into a number of topics, including his role as CEO of Oculus VR, the impact of being acquired by Facebook, the company’s relationship with the VR community, the worries those within the company had (rightly so as it turned out) over the potential backlash they’d face if they accepted Facebook’s offer, and more. All of which makes for a fascinating 19-and-a-half minutes viewing.