Enlarge / VR Attenborough (left) guides real-life Attenborough (right) through Hold the World. The amount of polygonal detail devoted to his face, arms, and shirt is remarkable in action.
David Attenborough gave me fossils. Jessica Chastain whispered me through a black hole.
After roughly three years of commercial viability, virtual reality seems to have excelled within a different realm than the one I typically wonder about: the film festival. Events like Sundance, Tribeca, and South By Southwest already overflow with weird, not-quite-accessible films about real-world drama, emotions, and nonsensical stories. And today, the only venue that fits those works better than arthouse theaters, quite frankly, is the ornate, vision-filling VR headset.
But filmmakers aren’t just descending onto hardware like HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Samsung GearVR in a boring, flash-in-the-pan manner. At SXSW 2018 in particular, they’re finally exhibiting a proficiency in two equally important extremes: what VR can sell that normal films cannot, and what VR must compromise or let go of for the sake of a better film experience.
I went eyes-on with nearly two dozen VR experiences at SXSW 2018, and I’ll be honest, some of them were rough. Some filmmakers still think that a 360-degree video that forces viewers to crane their neck and hunt around for content is a good idea (geez, please stop making those). Others packed far too much visual noise or too many unnecessary interactions into a 3D world that never answered the important question of why its content and message was better in VR than on a flat screen.
But the five experiences I list below all left me with both shivers and with hope for VR as an important storytelling medium for years to come.
Hold the World
My first glimpse at this VR experience was a window into someone else’s session, in which they appeared to look passively at giant whale bones set to a black background. Meh, I thought. Then I was ushered to my own kiosk, and when I sat down, I was taken aback by something quite different: a remarkable volumetric capture of a living, breathing Sir David Attenborough.
After clicking through a few menus in this seated Oculus Touch experience, I was transported to a laser-scanned room in London’s Natural History Museum, where Attenborough sat directly in front of me. The man was recreated entirely using real-time graphics technology, which developers confirm was filmed with a 106-camera rig at Microsoft’s headquarters in the Seattle area, as he introduced a variety of fossils. Hold the World essentially sits users down with Attenborough at the NHM while he rambles in effusive yet succinct fashion about a range of massive and tiny species from ancient eras. Instead of whale and dinosaur fossils, I opted to check out the collection’s smaller specimens: a dragonfly and a trilobite. (“We have a dragonfly here!” a developer incredulously shouted.)
The basic experience sounds like most any other 3D educational app: grab and rotate 3D models of specimens while listening to informative narration. But this Sky VR production, out of the UK, kicks it up a notch by having users sit with Attenborough—and I emphasize “sit” for a technological reason. The devs confirmed to me that this perspective allowed the team to focus its polygonal and texture budget on the absolutely remarkable detail in his face and shirt—all full of wrinkles, shadows, and details that remained static and high-quality even as I moved my head to look at Sir David from all sides. I compare this to last year’s SXSW VR award winner After Solitary, which had to invest more polygonal budget on its subject’s full body walking around. That one looks interesting but blurry; this limited, focused presentation reaches a whole other level.
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Source: ARS TECHNICA