Gadgetory

imagine watching the next Pixar film in virtual reality you can get a taste of what that might be like with invasion a short VR animation by Baio Bob Studios it's available for oculus rift HTC vive or the Samsung gear VR i sat down with CEO Maureen fan and Eric Darnell director of animated movies like ants and the Madagascar series to see what it takes to make a virtual reality short instead of looking at a rectangular screen and in a dark Theater you're now actually in that world so what is it like to be underwater in finding you or like you're actually there and you're participating in the story in the case of invasion because you are characters Eric can you show me anything specifically that you used visually in order to like direct the viewers attention one way or the other absolutely so here you see this Bunny's coming out of the rocks well first you has to escape from this Hawk that's got looking for lunch but once the hawk takes off the bunny comes out and we hear her sound that pulls your eye over there hopefully and the bunny spots you and looks you right in the eye now she looks off screen and that invites us to see what she's seeing what is she looking at and so everybody wants to see what the bunny sees and there's also a sound cue of that little ships are breaking the sound barrier which also gives us this cue in VR the sound is spatialized so you know that that sound of that ship is coming from right over there behind those trees in Maya a tool for creating computer graphics animators look out character movements then they put on a VR headset and watch the animation in real time to see what it looks like in 3d and so once we we sort of have that how we like it then we pass it over to the lighting team who begins putting all the finishing touches on everything Google's spotlight stories and the oculus story studio from Facebook are also working on animated films for VR headsets for us especially for real-time devices like the more advanced headsets we can change things on the fly so we can react to what a viewer does and have a care to move in space in a way that's different than they might for the next viewer what was the most exciting or the most thrilling part about working in VR there was one guy who said I look back and I saw the bunny hiding behind me and I wanted to then see what the aliens were doing so I turned to look at the aliens and I know I was just standing in your office but I could still feel the bunny's presence behind me almost like I can feel her breath on the back of my neck it was probably the air conditioning blowing or something but that's some of the sort of reptile brain stuff that VR can really dig deep and and and get to those places of your of your brain that I think other mediums can't because it does feel so much like you're really there