Facebook's
Oculus forms in-house virtual-reality film studio
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[January 27, 2015]
By Piya Sinha-Roy
PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) -
Facebook Inc's Oculus VR is getting into movies with an
in-house studio dedicated to making virtual-reality
films and premiered its first short piece at the
Sundance Film Festival on Monday.
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Tapping talent from both Pixar, the animation studio behind
computer graphics imagery (CGI) films "Toy Story" and "Monsters
Inc," and the video gaming world, Oculus' Story Studio will
develop film content for virtual reality and advise other
filmmakers seeking to try the technology.
Facebook bought Oculus last year for $2 billion. So far the
business has largely focused on video games for its pioneering
wrap-around Rift headset.
But virtual reality has recently been enticing Hollywood's
filmmakers to expand into the 360-degree panoramic view offered
by headsets.
Oculus debuted "Lost" on Monday, the first of five short
animated films that it is making over the next year.
Directed by former Pixar artist Saschka Unseld, now the creative
director of Story Studios, "Lost" places the viewer in the midst
of a forest where a mechanical creature bounds into the scene.
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Oculus' Chief Executive Brendan Iribe described it as "a
real-time version of a Pixar experience that you're inside of."
This year at Sundance, the largest U.S. independent film
gathering, part of the event has been dedicated to
virtual-reality short movies by filmmakers including Chris Milk
and Felix & Paul, to draw the independent film community.
Oculus also hopes to explore VR film experiences in real time,
which would allow viewers to interact inside the headset with
objects and characters.
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"This is really tuning in to what a lot of people who are extending
360-degree film into VR cannot do yet," Iribe said. "It's getting
into the heart and soul and magic of VR."
But virtual-reality films are still a long way from becoming
mainstream as the headsets to display them have yet to reach the
mass market.
While Samsung Electronics Co Ltd offers its Galaxy Gear VR headset
with its Galaxy Note 4 smartphone and Google Inc has its Cardboard
VR device to use with smartphones, the consumer version of Oculus'
Rift headset is still in development.
There are also technological and creative constraints to developing
film in virtual reality, said Unseld. Challenges include computers
running too slowly to handle the intensive rendering of graphics in
real time, as well as how to find a format for storytelling in a
360-degree environment where the viewer can look anywhere.
"Film has very linear storytelling, it's one-dimensional," Unseld
said. "In VR, you need to find a three-dimensional way of telling
the story where the space around you matters."
(Editing by Mary Milliken, Bernard Orr)
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