Just Business : Inspiration from Hollywood

NOTE TO OUR FAITHFUL READERS:
This post will be a departure from our irregularly scheduled technical, design, and development musings. Today, we are focusing on that elusive topic called business. Enjoy.

Back in the day, my boys and I were on the high-school wrestling squad. We actually competed at a fairly high level, Varsity won state that year. And at least once a month, the night before match, we’d gather in front of the TV, and watch our deepest wrestling inspiration: VisionQuest. The scene with Matthew Modine beasting up the peg wall then running up and down the stadium bleachers are etched into my brain for life. I can still recall them when I need that last little boost for triathlons.

So now we get to the topic at hand, business. Who’d have thought, there are movies that inspire there too. And here they are. Watch and learn.

color-of-money-movie

5. the Color of Money

Official-poster-for-Wall-Street-1987

 

4. Wall Street

“Greed is Good.” Watch the speech. Again. and Again. That is all.

 

 

blood-diamond-movie

3. Blood Diamond
“What’s the business in this one?” you ask. Quite simply: Hustle. If you need the abbreviated lesson, just skip to the scene where DiCaprio barters the weapons for the diamonds…

The-Social-Network-movie-poster-David Fincher

 

2. The Social Network

The youngest, richest, most successful entrepreneur of the 21st century deserves a decent treatment… and this one is genius.

 

 

JOBS-movie-poster

 

1. Jobs

Steve Jobs captained Apple from a “has been” into the most profitable, most valuable company in the world. There are lessons here. We shall say no more.

 

 

 

 

Further Inspiration & Investigations…

This list is the companion piece to “Required Reading for VR.”
Your choice. Reading or viewing. Programming, either way.

…did I mention the Matrix?

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

 

Capturing Virtual Worlds to Virtual Cinema : How To

We’ve just read once, twice, three times this most excellent tutorial / thought piece by D Coetzee, entitled “Capturing Virtual Worlds: A Method for Taking 360 Virtual Photos and Videos“.

The article gets into the dirty details of how we might transform a high-powered, highly interactive VR experience into a compact* file sharable with all our friends on a multitude of platforms (cardboard, mergeVR, oculus, webVR, etc)

Having spent a great deal of time figuring out these strategies ourselves, its good to see someone articulate the challenge, the process, and future development paths so well.

360 3d panorama thin strip stitching

Most accessible present-day solution: a script that renders thin vertical strips with a rotating stereo camera array, then stitches into the final panorama

Enjoy.

  • the term “compact” is used here liberally. A typical 5 minute VR experience might weigh in at 500MB for the download. Transforming this into a 120MB movie might be considered lightweight… for VR. Time to beef up your data plans, kiddies. And developers, say it with me now : algorithmic content 🙂