Oculus Rift Makes a VR Film

January 26, 2015, 02:35 PM

https://www.aotg.com/oculus-rift-makes-a-vr-film/

As thousands of movie fans and industry heavyweights gather at the annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, virtual reality company Oculus VR is unveiling its first internally-created movie –and shining a light on plans to help Hollywood make more of its own. The short film, called Lost, is directed by animator Saschka Unseld, best known for his work on the 2013 Pixar short The Blue Umbrella. It was created by an internal division of Oculus called Story Studio that’s focused on making original VR content and helping Hollywood directors learn the tricks of the VR trade. Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe says the need for the film –and the division that created it– became clear after he ran a tech demo showing off the company’s Oculus Rift VR headset to a major Hollywood director. “He took [the headset] off at one point and said, Brendan, let’s make a movie, how do we do this?” says Iribe. “But I didn’t have an answer for him. We really wouldn’t know how to do that well. So we said, let’s go back and study this and figure out how would you use the Rift for cinema.” Over the last year, Oculus recruited a small team of filmmakers and executives from outfits including Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic. “We wanted to figure out how to do a short cinema experience that could really educate and inspire the community,” says Iribe. Watching Lost is not a typical film experience. Hypothetically, the short is only about five minutes long, but the virtual reality environment allows it to be studied according to the viewer’s own interests and pace. You’re immersed in it, so you can stop and examine areas of particular interest, and the environment can respond –look at a swarm of fireflies, and they might fly over and play with you. “It’s like you’re sitting on that stage and the play is happening all around you,” says Iribe. “The magic of VR is that you truly feel present in the environment.” As thousands of movie fans and industry heavyweights gather at the annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, virtual reality company Oculus VR is unveiling its first internally-created movie –and shining a light on plans to help Hollywood make more of its own. The short film, called Lost, is directed by animator Saschka Unseld, best known for his work on the 2013 Pixar short The Blue Umbrella. It was created by an internal division of Oculus called Story Studio that’s focused on making original VR content and helping Hollywood directors learn the tricks of the VR trade. Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe says the need for the film –and the division that created it– became clear after he ran a tech demo showing off the company’s Oculus Rift VR headset to a major Hollywood director. “He took [the headset] off at one point and said, Brendan, let’s make a movie, how do we do this?” says Iribe. “But I didn’t have an answer for him. We really wouldn’t know how to do that well. So we said, let’s go back and study this and figure out how would you use the Rift for cinema.” Over the last year, Oculus recruited a small team of filmmakers and executives from outfits including Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic. “We wanted to figure out how to do a short cinema experience that could really educate and inspire the community,” says Iribe. Watching Lost is not a typical film experience. Hypothetically, the short is only about five minutes long, but the virtual reality environment allows it to be studied according to the viewer’s own interests and pace. You’re immersed in it, so you can stop and examine areas of particular interest, and the environment can respond –look at a swarm of fireflies, and they might fly over and play with you. “It’s like you’re sitting on that stage and the play is happening all around you,” says Iribe. “The magic of VR is that you truly feel present in the environment.” Unlike the other films at Sundance, Oculus hasn’t brought Lost in order to sell it to a distributor –rather, the company is looking to sell filmmakers on the entire idea of making movies in VR, and explain how the Story Studio team can work with them to help figure out the technological and administrative challenges involved in that process. “The hope is that we can put this out there and start to really get some folks in Hollywood creating cinematic experiences in VR,” says Iribe. Lost might be the first virtual reality film made by Oculus, but it’s not the first of its kind — a few dozen indie efforts are also on show this week at Sundance, and several other companies are working on projects of their own. In November, cinematic VR hardware and content startup Jaunt released a VR short of Paul McCartney performing “Live and Let Die”; in October, filmmaker Danfung Dennis released Zero Point, the first film shot in 360-degree video expressly for the Oculus Rift. Founded in 2012 by Iribe and VR prodigy Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR was purchased by Facebook last spring in a deal worth $2 billion. And Facebook isn’t the only tech giant interested in virtual reality: Last week, Microsoft MSFT -0.36% unveiled a new product called the HoloLens Augmented Reality headset; Google GOOGL -0.94% has dabbled in the technology with a DIY rig made of (and called) Cardboard; Samsung recently released Gear VR, a headset co-developed with Oculus; and Sony is developing a VR headset codenamed Project Morpheus.

Oculus Rift made a first VR film and is planning to show it in Hollywood.

#film#technology#animation#oculus rift#vr#virtual reality