Snowflakes flutter around my face, taking me back to my childhood in Ohio where I’d tilt back my head to gaze at the swirl of tiny crystals spiraling toward my blinking eyelashes. When I stick out my palm to catch a snowflake, I’m a little disappointed that I don’t feel a tiny, cold pinprick on my skin.
Instead of playing in the suburban driveway of my family’s Columbus two-story home, I’m inside the storybook woodland of Baobab Studios’ latest virtual-reality animated short, “Rainbow Crow.” Golden sunrays filter through the trees, casting long shadows. The motion-tracking controllers I’m holding turn my arms into translucent blue branches that can conjure up snow with a flick of my wrist. I sweep my hands to blanket the cushy grass with white drifts.
In literal reality, I know I’m standing in a gray-carpeted conference room in the VR animation studio’s small office about 35 miles south of San Francisco. Through the room’s fishbowl-glass entrance, I see most of Baobab’s 20 employees quietly tap keyboards at a hodgepodge of desks in different heights and five colors of laminate veneer. A wall of windows looks out over a strip mall and San Francisco Bay wetlands.
But knowing all that doesn’t stop me from trying to reach out to grab a snowflake. Twice.
Don’t judge me. Virtual reality is hacking my brain, and I feel tickled about the invasion.
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Which one’s Mac and which is Cheez? Both want to take over the Earth, in Baobab’s “Invasion.”
Baobab Studios
VR, which relies on audio-visual headsets that you strap over your eyes to immerse you in a digital world, is being hailed as one of the tech’s industry’ next big things. Companies like Google, Facebook and Samsung are investing billions of dollars to figure out how to make VR stories, games and apps compelling enough to convince you to spend $80 to $800 for one of their headsets. For animators, including startups like 2-year-old Baobab, VR marks the first new medium since 1995, when Pixar released its ground-breaking, computer-generated feature film, “Toy Story.”
“It’s a way to animate directly to another single human being,” says Alvy Ray Smith, who co-founded Pixar with Edwin Catmull in 1986 and now sits on Baobab’s board of advisers.
“It’s like a crude form of artificial intelligence. ” – Maureen Fan
That’s because VR triggers human responses — both psychological and neurological — unlike any medium that came before it. It goes beyond the pounding of your heart during a movie’s car chase or the sniffles you try to hide when a TV show’s protagonists finally find true love.
With VR, you can look down and see yourself in a different body. Take a step forward and your vantage point shifts as it would in real life. The effect goes beyond the novelty of watching your bunny belly bulge when you squat. Embodying an animal in a virtual environment can trick you into feeling physical prods that aren’t there and even enhance your connectedness with nature. Characters — humans, aliens, animals and other creatures imagined by animators — look you straight in the eye as if they’re actually seeing you.
Like most people who’ve tested VR, I’ve felt uncomfortable rubbernecking my head in circles, mouth agape, with a clunky black box cinched to my face. I know I look silly in the photos people snap while I’m in VR land. But in a few years, we might be spending more of our money on virtual reality than on music worldwide.
This is your brain on VR
An evolving body of science suggests this kind of immersion and interaction fires up your brain in ways a big-screen movie or a book can’t. That’s allowing studios like Baobab to drive the art of storytelling.
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Source: CNET