There are several good choices this week, with the first being Star Trek Beyond. Have no doubt, I will be in the audience for that one, probably paying the extra for the 3D IMAX variant. For those needing a serious influx of silly, Ice Age: Collision Course also includes a spaceship, although it may bounce of more planets than the Enterprise does.
Toho is releasing GANTZ:O on October 14th, at least in Japan. It is a 3D modeled CGI presentation, as opposed to the original 2d hand drawn (at least the key frames) animation, and the more recent live action version only used 3D CGI for the special effects and aliens. This one is also a feature film based on the Manga, like the live action films, where the 2D animation was a series that spanned half a year.
Pixar in a Box is a free online animation training curriculum developed as a joint venture by Pixar and the Khan Academy. The classes include effects, character modeling, rigging, sets and staging, and rendering, as well as a number of important topics that may not have occurred to you are part of the process. I am signing up with Khan Academy (mostly so I can save my progress and don’t have to wonder where I am on a given course) and checking out the wide range of free math, science, and computer programming online classes they have to offer, starting with the animation training. That isn’t all they have of course; history, art, economics, and many more topics are also available. But I only have so many hours a day that aren’t spent at work, so I have to choose which classes I take carefully. To give you an idea of what they have on offer, here is the Pixar class overview that they start the training with.
There will be 85 hours of VR programming coming out of the Olympics watchable by way of the NBC Sports app. Sadly the plan is to make this only available to Samsung Galaxy smartphones compatible with Gear VR, and that only after logging in with their pay TV provider. I fully understand and agree with the need to authenticate viewers before allowing them access to their premium content; they are paying an awful lot of money to get the exclusive distribution rights, after all. But there are a lot of us VR junkies running everything from Google Cardboard with an iPhone or non-Samsung android phone, on up to the Oculus Rift crowd driving their $500 VR headsets with their $1,500 computers with the massive graphics cards, who could be watching this programming if they would allow us a paid authentication path into it as well.
Still, this is the very first time any VR access to the Olympics has ever been available, and the second major sporting event to be hosted in this format this year (the first being the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which came with a Google Cardboard viewer you could fold up and use with your smartphone to view the photo shoots in VR). There is a good chance their app builders have only been able to make it work on the Samsung version of Android so far, limiting it to the Gear. I certainly can’t imagine they don’t want to sell the programing to every one they could, although if they didn’t develop the VR app themselves they may be at the mercy of the contracts signed by the folks who did create it. So I for one will be keeping my fingers crossed that they manage to deploy it to the iPhone iOS and other Android builds in time for the rest of us to sign up for it and enjoy it during the Olympics. Although we wont be able to see it live; there is a bit of a delay in editing and processing the stereo 360 degree SuperHD 8K video into a formatted stream that can be fed to the app, and yes, that is a 4K movie theater resolution video stream for each eye. And even if they don’t have a way to deliver it to anything but a Gear for the Olympics themselves, once they have it recorded the rest of us can enjoy it down the road when they do get the app working for all the other platforms. Thanks to VR Scout for the heads up on this one.
BBC Taster is the experimental site for the development of digital content and emerging technology, and it is chock full of both 360 degree videos as well as true VR experiences, which are well worth exploring. In my mind, the difference between the two is interactivity; if you can click on icons to change the presentation in different ways it is VR, if not it is a 360 movie. As a single instance of what is on offer at BBC Taster, The Kraken Wakes 360 started with the radio play and musical score they created from John Wyndham’s science fiction novel of the same name. They layered the 360 degree video on top of a piece of that and made it available for public viewing, with the request that once you watch it (or any of their VR/360 pieces) you rate it. They are trying to get an idea of what works and doesn’t work for people with different kinds of presentations before they crank it up to full production mode, and unlike all the developers using focus groups and test audiences in secret or restricted environments, they are making the public part of the decision making process right from the beginning. They are also taking it on tour across the UK to events like the Sheffield Doc/Fest 2016 which begins today, setting up VR presentation areas complete with the hardware and headsets, so people who don’t have the gear at home can give their feedback. Nor are they the only ones; the Alternate Realities: Virtual Reality Arcade at the Sheffield Documentary Festival has a range of presentations, including the ones from BBC Taster, organized and implemented by Site Gallery and supported by the Arts Council of England. As the year progresses there will be more and more of these kinds of organized public VR gatherings all over the world, so keep your eyes out for the ones happening in your neighborhood.
This is Alf Lovvold’s Dawn Of The Planet Of The Zombies And The Killer Plants On Some Serious Acid, a tasty trailer done by just one guy. Check out his interview in 3DArtist for an idea of how he went about creating this.