VR | Letters from the Virtual Reality Frontier is a first-person experimental documentary web-series that takes an inside look at the dreams, memories, and waking-life thoughts of pioneering virtual reality developers.
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The series’ title sequence was an official selection at SXSW Excellence in Title Design where it screened against heavyweight Blockbusters like Godzilla, Captain America, and American Horror Story. As the project has started leaking into the world, the feedback so far has been great, and we’re excited to continue the ride and finish its most ambitious next stage.
As incredible as the story surrounding Virtual Reality technology is, its creation in the 60’s, its popular rise in the 90’s, it’s fall shortly after, and recent resurrection from a heap of ski-goggles and smartphone parts, it’s a silicon valley story we’ve heard before.
Tanner, Neil, and I (Jerred) have been collaborating on films since we were kids, and started Cascadium to continue experimenting with the form.
Movies like Enter the Void and games like Half-Life 2, even James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake”, stand out in the level of immersion the audience is given and in how they experience the story from the first-person perspective of the main character. Once the early experiments in Virtual Reality started coming out, we knew there was a place for a project that lived in both the film and game worlds to tell a person’s inner story, and give insight into their dreams, memories, and waking-life thoughts while letting the audience interact with them, just like they were theirs.
This is what VR aims to do. As a First-Person, interactive documentary series it looks at the deeper lives of its subject, ignoring the outer story you may have already heard about, in favor of the story on the inside.
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For the series’ first episode, we’re focusing on Robin Arnott, who’s creating the psychedelic virtual reality game Soundself, a game that reproduces a psychedelic hallucination. Robin based Soundself on an experience he had at Burning Man a few years ago, where on acid, he ended up in a structure the shape of an onion and started hallucinating moving color vibrations while chanting.
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This episode will recreate that first acid trip, soaring over the playa of the festival before descending down into the installation Re-Onion. We’ll move through several other vignettes from his life, including a recurring dream he’s had since he was a kid. Baby in a decrepit house. That’s all you get for now.
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Rendering and creating photo-realistic, massive resolution, Virtual Reality environments requires a lot of computer horsepower. It also requires talented hands operating them. All donated funds will go to bringing our hardware up to the task and hiring additional, talented texture, lighting, and interactive artists to help ease the workload so that we can have a polished first episode before the end of the year.
It will go to keeping the lights on while we take a break from our commercial work and dedicate ourselves to the project full-time.
It will also be used to pay for our amazing composer, Marley Carrol, who's music was used for the title sequence.
That’s not to say virtual reality environments modeled and textured from real ones can’t be done with lesser means, more time, or at lesser resolutions. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly easy all the time.
This is what our course will help to teach. Apart from Virtual Reality film, these same techniques can be used for game design, pre-visualization, architecture, surveying, and any discipline that requires detailed replicas of real-world environments that they can interact with, with a level of freedom and creativity that is impossible in the physical world.
The course will cover the entire pipeline, from start to finish:
1. 3D scanning and point cloud generation of real world environments.
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2. HDR panoramic image capture and stitching.
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3. Retopology and UV texturing, the process of simplifying the geometry of the point cloud.
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4. Projection painting, using the spherical panoramas and additional high-quality images for texturing.
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5. Game Engine interaction.
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We like working in the aesthetic of VR, and so, we’ve taken its imagery and worked it into apparel and a limited edition offset-printed poster. You can even have us fly out to your childhood home and scan and texture it so that you can wander it's hallways and bedrooms whenever you feel nostalgic!
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Virtual Reality film is still in its infancy. Most productions to date have used one of two approaches.
An elaborate array of stereoscopic cameras that are stitched into 360 degree films.
Entirely Computer Generated environments.
Each have their benefits and are being explored and developed by incredibly gifted artists.
This project hopes to provide an alternative between the two, the realism of on-set photography with the creative freedom of CG worlds.
We hope you think the possibilities are as cool as we do.
If you are a VFX or interactive artist yourself and would like to lend a hand on the project, we’d love to talk to you!
If you like the project or know someone who might, you’ll be giving the project it’s greatest gift by helping to spread the word.
Thanks so much for your help and interest. We can't do it without you.
