I downloaded it for Windows. It has a mp4 file inside the zip. I was able to watch it using VLC on Ubuntu. Despite being a 360° image all cramped on a square screen it was still pretty scary =P
Ran the Mac OS version on Yosemite with 0.4.2 version of the Oculus SDK on a DK2.
Loved it. Awesome job. Feels like a haunted house that moves around you instead of you moving through it. Very immersive. Will show this off to other people.
IPD was kind of weird though. I felt like a giant in the dungeon. What kind of camera setup did you use to film this, and how far apart were the cameras?
Also, I did not feel the 3D sound, though the issue may have been with my ears or me not paying attention to it. I will retry again later tonight and report on the results.
So the camera setup was a fairly standard 6 GoPro rig (Freedom Rig). Unfortunately we didn't have the budget for the 3D VR GoPro rig (needing 12 GoPro's).
Would love to hear your feedback on the sound, as audio was a big focus for us on this production
Not going to pretend I haven't tried it out of curiosity, along with the usual Rift demos.
It's quite immersive but there's no getting past the fact that you have a big mask strapped to your head. However, trying it, you can see how once the Rift is more popular and less bulky, and the providers in this space can justify investing a bit more, it will take off.
Just as interesting will be new types of cinema-style experiences and short films, hopefully!
Just lock the door before you enjoy the industry's oculus offerings, to avoid someone untowardly bursting in and finding you unaware and wearing only a cinema strapped to your face
That's just a setting choice on most up-to-date cameras. The mainstream film industry likes 24fps because it blurs motion nicely, among other aesthetic reasons. Feature films generally aim for expressionism rather than a simulacrum of reality.
I've never worked in porn but it wouldn't surprise me if 24p is the norm just because it's such a popular workflow choice that it's a highly-optimized default in many video-editing packages, and there probably isn't enough paying demand to support the 2.5x extra storage and bandwidth requirements of 60fps. I'd have thought for Oculus Rift the money would in 3d-modeled games rather than anything recorded with a real camera anyway.
One suggestion: On my first view, I ended up looking "backwards" for ~75% of the movie. I might have hit something at the beginning, but my forward-facing orientation couldn't see any of the action and there weren't any visual cues to tell me that if I turned around there were things happening until late in the movie. May be one of those weird things that VR needs to handle differently.
Excited to see more!
PS - I have a mac and DK2 but it's brand new, so could have been user error.
This actually strikes me as the #1 limiting factor for this technology and interactive fiction in general. A good story depends very much on causality. If the viewer in a virtual environment can get stuck in the corner (ie failing to direct attention/activity to key narrative elements) then the basic options are to a) move the viewer along automatically, as in some videogames or b) wait for the viewer to get un-stuck and pick up the story again. Unfortunately the first approach ends up more as a ride than an interactive experience, while the second baldy undermines the suspension of disbelief.
This is not to say there's no way to do it - if you establish the basic narrative grammar early you can certainly tell an interactive story, but probably at the cost of limiting complexity. The most effective examples I can think of are from ThatGameCompany, especially Journey.
hey, i would love to see this work for google cardboard (i'm too poor for rift ;) - i see there's a get notified when it comes to mobile, but i can't click it.
Yes, we're actively working on getting a mobile version out, we expect to have an Android version this week, and iOS shortly after (obviously pending app store approval as well). If you shoot us an email at press@1157.pm we'll let you know when you can download it.
I keep thinking I should be able to set up my FPV goggles that have head tracking to connect to my computer to use as rift type goggles.. Every time I start poking around to see what it would take though, it seems all the similar projects are overseas which makes acquiring some of the components a huge hassle for me.
We've updated the copy to make it a little more clear what version to download. This is a little side project we've done besides our regular day job so every piece of feedback is helpful, thanks :)
Yes, we're actively working on getting the Android version up and running so people with Google cardboard can view it as well (and any other VR cardboard ofcourse)
Shoot us an email at press@1157.pm and we'll let you know when it's ready (hopefully this week)
You could watch a static video, but head motion would not be tracked in that configuration. They probably recorded with some sort of non standard fish-eye lens, so no video player will exist that could achieve the desired effect. A bunch of transformations have to be done to make the video work with cardboard (source, I have developed a quick demo with cardboard and OpenGL before).
There's multiple video players for Android that take 'oculus' style side-by-side video and allow you to watch it with head tracking. OK - the inter-eye distance and distortion<>lens mapping might not be 100% but it mostly works.
Requires OS X Yosemite. If you've chosen not to upgrade, for example because you value your privacy and disagree with Apple's recent data collection policies which are enabled by default in Yosemite, then you won't be able to run this.
I don't understand why. As far as I know, there's no such thing as an executable that requires Windows 8. Or, if there is, then no one would think of excluding those who are running Windows 7. So why exclude those who are running older OS X versions? Are there any legitimate technical reasons for this decision?
It would be cool if you could watch this on Youtube. I know you won't get the same experience as if you had a Rift, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who would love to watch a reaction video of someone experiencing it, along with seeing their perspective.
EDIT: Okay, this was a dumb thing to say. It came across as a complaint, but really I was just trying to ask a question. Sorry.
I dunno about you, but when I'm developing something quickly I often like to just use (and test on) the newest thing out there. Backwards compatibility (and sometimes lack of developer features) is costly if you're on a budget. For example, I'm building an iOS app right now and only targeting 8.1 at the moment while I'm initially testing. Going back a few versions... I just don't have time for at this stage.
I'm one of the makers. I run Mavericks and can run the Mac app (that has 3D sound), but you will need to hold down Control when opening the app (its in the README).
If you still can't run it, you can download the PC version (which is just the regular movie file) and use any Oculus Rift compatible player (though you won't have 3D sound unfortunately).
Cool, thanks! What sort of libraries are used for crossplatform 3D sound nowadays? FMOD used to be the gold standard for this. I'm wondering if it's still sufficient, or if that's changed. Thanks for your time!
EDIT: Oh, I see. The PC version is just an MP4 file. Neat hack. I wonder if there are any video formats which embed 3D sound...
EDIT2: Hmm, just to let you know, it seems the mp4 file is somehow corrupt: http://i.imgur.com/Zn44nvJ.png It plays, but only one frame every five seconds or so are showing up. I'll try redownloading it.
What is 3D sound in this context? At the end of the day you've got however many channel to work with, and that's it. You can do lots of fancy phase trickery to make things sound like they're going up and down on the Z axis, but it's still delivered in stereo or 5.1 or whatever.
When I think of 3D sound I think of stuff like ircam spat[0] but that just outputs normal audio like anything else.
3d sound in this context means when you turn your head the sound remains in the same '3d' position(so if the sound was coming from the side and you turn to face it, it now sound like it's coming from ahead), which is important for vr (with headphones). This isn't really possible with a prerecorded video file unless you have a clever player that can do the 3d transformations from the original sound channels, but I'm not aware of any that can do this yet
I suppose this would be pretty difficult with "live" recorded sound. Stereo microphone arrays are a complex business already, AFAIK there's no audio equivalent of the 360 degree cameras they use for recording VR. Microphones simply cannot be made as directional as speakers.
However with a multichannel surround sound recording, panning/fading the tracks dynamically according to head movements is trivial, all games do this. So I guess you would want a file format that placed all the channels in 3D space over time. That's the kind of thing the spat software I linked in the above post does, except it's also doing cutting edge acoustic modelling and so forth. It needs a hefty computer.
Absolutely true what you're saying. That's why we didn't use live audio for this, but all the sounds were made by a sound studio and placed in a virtual room around a head. We just didn't have the budget to record binaural audio, so we're faking it, till we making it :)
Thanks for the comment. This is exactly how we did this, Wemersive made a special player for us (and the sound studio) that takes into account the position of the oculus and transform/pan the sound to the right position in the virtual room.
