"The world is too much with us -Wordsworth

am_Unition:

    3-D 360-degree camera system

This.

I have been envisioning the inevitability of an Oculus Rift-style movie watching environment for a while. I can guarantee its eventual existence, but I'm unsure of how things will play out.

My immersion in a piece of media depends on a lot of things, but 3-D movies and TV just don't do me well. There's something about having 1) Your peripherals in native 3-D, 2) the non-screen area inside of your glasses filtered through the glasses, and 3) the virtually 3-D screen images coming through the glasses. Too many different modes of visual information for total immersion or something. And did they ever get the glasses to weigh less than 12 oz.?

I've never strapped on Oculus Rift, but it looks wayyyy more immersive. Can you imagine being in a scene? Not following some recorded path like they talk about in the article, but free to walk around, in addition to being able to look whichever direction you'd like. Obviously, you'd need to shoot the film from an array of 3D cameras and get some pretty expensive visual processing software, but it can be done.

Will we be torrenting 2 terrabyte files to watch movies? Because we damn sure won't assemble in movie theaters to sit down in a seat. Neither will we release multiple people into a room, as they will eventually collide with one another whilst walking around the scenes. Maybe we'll have businesses that offer huge spaces to rent, one per person, to just walk around in with your 3-D headset on. They could provide some sort of stimulus, like switching from smooth concrete to increasingly mushy astroturf when walking too far from the center of the room. Naturally, the actions taking place in the virtual scene are typically centered in the middle of the physical room... but could you imagine baiting the viewer to run off in a certain direction to witness the climax of the movie?

Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness paragraph(s), but seriously, I do think VR holds a lot of adoption potential.


posted 3373 days ago