Category Archives: video

Arrival of a Train… and a new medium is born

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Ever since watching Sascha Unseld’s talk at Oculus Connect last year, which prominently featured “Arrival of a Train“, one of the very first silent films, we’ve been noodling on a little side project concerning a VR capture of a train locomotive in action.

After many trials and errors, and much reverse-engineering of train schedules, and inclement weather, we’ve finally captured a nice little rough draft piece of footage. We’ve posted the 360 footage, captured with our Ricoh Theta, to YouTube, for your enjoyment.

Here are a few stills. Scroll down for the complete video. Be sure to a) fullscreen it using the little [__] icon in the lower right of frame, and b) click and drag around with your mouse (or look around if in googles).

Oh, and we’ve included the original “Arrival of a Train” for your viewing reference. The reason its so famous? Reportedly, crowds fled the theatres waaaaay back in the day, convinced that the 2d animation on the screen was in fact a train headed directly for them. This allegory is often used to communicate how audiences viscerally experience a brand new medium — half is the content, half is the novelty of the experience.

gTrain-inbound-01

 

gTrain-midtrain-02

gTrain-freight-03

I was quite concerned that the train would knock over the tripod, it was within inches of the car extents. Thankfully, the rig survived, and we even got a friendly wave from the engineers.

 

 

and, finally, the original to which we pay homage:
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1895)

First person VR lightsaber : the design intent

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We’ve helped pioneer first person VR lightsaber control in-Rift with our ScenePlay demo app. This is what happens when you take that vector and extend it towards its logical conclusion: just add photorealistic rendering, VR cinema backplates, AI stormtroopers, laser bolts and explosions… voila.

Consider this advanced pre-viz of the experiences coming down the pipe in the next 3 years. Start practicing up your swordplay skills, and Enjoy.

What’s a lightsaber look like, you might ask? Well, this:

Mark Zuckerberg tests out the new Oculus touch hand controllers as Brendan Iribe observes

Mark Zuckerberg tests out the new Oculus touch hand controllers as Brendan Iribe observes

And this;

Testing out the Sony Move hand controllers paired with the Sony Morpheus VR HMD for the PlayStation 4

Testing out the Sony Move hand controllers & Sony Morpheus VR HMD for the PlayStation 4

Or, if you prefer the dark side, go ahead, play Vader:

Unity 5 port complete

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Well, the port to Unity 5 took a bit longer than expected. Then again, what port doesn’t? Overall, we’re very happy with the more robust namespace support in code, and the physically based shader model. It took quite some time to re-tool all our custom shaders into a PBR model, but once done, the results are spectacular, no pun intended.

R2-PBR-shaders

R2D2 with the new PBR in Unity5. We’re loving that blue-alloy metal look!

And, we finally solved the mascara issue with all our character models, which we created in Mixamo’s excellent Fuse product. For those techies / artists out there: the trick is to duplicate the existing Legacy/Diffuse-Bump shader for each character, keep the textures and normals, and set the shader model to “Standard / Specular / Fade” with a smoothness of 1.0. Do the same with the eyes, and you’ll have that beautiful “twinkle in the eyes” that all pseudo-living avatars should properly exhibit.

Luke finally drops the mascara and gets real eyebrows -- and a spark

Luke finally drops the mascara and gets real eyebrows — and a spark

In other news, our friends at Magic Leap released their first actual concept video. Just single-player for now, but fun stuff nonetheless.

That’s all for today.

Onward.

Designing for Glass, by Glass

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This is a wonderful treatment of a spoken word recording by Ira Glass, of NPR’s This American Life. He speaks the core truth of creative people: when you have a vision, translating it to reality is an iterative, lengthy process.

I think many of us who are experiencing Glass have great visions of its potential… and now comes the hard work of translating those visions into actual applications and businesses.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.