Virtual Reality (VR) has long been discussed as a potential technology not only amongst gamers but also in other industries as well and Oculus has been in the forefront in each of these conversations. Oculus VR has formed an internal unit – Oculus Story Studio that will make VR movies and one such movie was screened at the Sundance Film Festival 2015.
Oculus debuted Lost on Monday, the first of five short animated films that it is making over the next year.
Oculus Story Studio is a group of artists, creators, and technicians formed under the grand ambition to push story-telling forward. The group sees VR as the next era of filmmaking. First there was moving pictures, then sound, color, CGI and 3D. Next is VR, according to the company.
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.
There are also technological and creative constraints to developing film in virtual reality, said Saschka. 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.
Oculus Story Studio plans to release five movies this year and each aims to help the studio explore and learn something different about VR. The movies, and their creative ambitions are: Lost (magic and wonder), Kabloom (humor), Bullfighter (sense of presence), and Dear Angelica (what would it feel like to be inside an illustration?). Some of these movies were shown during the Sundance Film Festival this week in Utah.
Founded in 2012 by VR prodigy Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe, Oculus VR was purchased by Facebook in 2014 in a deal worth $2 billion. And the VR bug has not only bit Facebook. Last week, Microsoft unveiled a new product called the HoloLens Augmented Reality headset; Samsung recently released Gear VR, a headset co-developed with Oculus; and Sony is developing a VR headset codenamed Project Morpheus; Google too with its DIY project Cardboard has dabbled in the VR technology.