oculus

Things you should know working with VR

3d, VR

So basically I care most about cinematic Vr. But it does help, IMO to to know basics, History, real time, rendering technology and all the rest.  Even though Vr is an old “thing” vr content used to be very scarce and closely connected to specific hardware- usually so called caves. Basically, for most of common people who are not lucky enough to be around in 70’s somewhere in usa, uk, de universities in mathematics engineering or it departments or military… well then for you Vr content is non existent :)

So there was some scientific research, but there was very little “artistic” stuff. And even though there where some artists doing installations but not so many so the common “language”of vr would emerge.

Now that we have so called second wave of VR, we have much more people trying to make content. Most do game related content – which makes sense- as soon as we have positional tracking we need real time 3d rendering. (unless again you are in research team that works with light fields or similar..)

Others yet go for real life filming or so called action footage. Animators are somewhat in between these two extremes, on one hand we are closer to video – cos we are used to make stories, aka “films” on the other hand we create stuff more then we capture from real life and  in that regard we are closer to game creators. Now ofcource all things overlap and there cannot be clear cut definitions and boundaries…

So people from the second wave are creating content for about 3 years now. And some share their knowledge and experience publicly. Here I gathered some material from youtube and other places. If you work on Vr content some of these might be relevant to you.  Now most of them fall either in 3d real time category or 360 video. But one can always find relevant information even if it is not exactly from your field – most things are connected. So here it goes, my link collection:

  1. what is vr? from Chaos group (makers of vray)
  2. Articles from WEIRD. 6 rools for VR cinematic content, where do you show your films / experiences ? vr / movie ? and more festivals are poping up, I ll have to make a list later..
  3. 5 lessons from “Lost”, oculus story studio. And another post from their blog   on Swayze Effect  ” Can you even tell stories in VR?  What if you can’t? What are we even doing? “
  4. Why do we care about locomotion in VR? The motion in VR from real time rendering perspective.. “Limbo” “Blink” “comfort mode“
  5. general things: Different Different projects. Story telling in VR. New adventures for creativity.  SVVR. 
  6. techniques. Light fields, Octaine, Rendering optimization Pollen (Unity 5 engine).
  7. What does the Oculus say? The Carmack himself!  Optimization of your VR.  Developing for VR. Not so much technical but very important –  Human visual system and Vr. Sound for VR.

 

Some other good resources:

VFX VR boot camp. Example here. Digital tutors.  And the book.

Most of this was for real time Vr. Next update will be more towards cinematic VR.And one after that – books and academic thoughts on VR.