"The world is too much with us -Wordsworth
- 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.
Have you tried any of this technology?
Also, it goes without saying that the porn industry will see an amazing growth in fee-based content. People will pay for porn again...
I know I wouldn't be able to focus on the movie so well if wandering were implemented. Perhaps movies will be a combination of wandering scenes and fixed scenes. I feel I would be distracted as a viewer with that liberty, but who knows?
You can already watch a movie in a digital theatre in Oculus Rift.
So I haven't yet tried an Oculus Rift or Google Glass or the like. What I have tried a year or so ago is this thing:
It's called a 'Reality Cube'. You stand in a cube with three sides and the floor that are projected on from the outside. You wear a cap with a motion sensor and it changes the render based on where inside the cube your head is. Basically the same idea as this guy with his Wii, but completely covering your field of vision because it's all around you. It doesn't even feature 3D glasses.
Regardless, it's amazing - I have not had a more immersive experience since. First, they demoed a small French burial cave that you could squat in. They scanned it in for research and renderings. It was only a couple feet high, almost entirely dark. I could use the Wiimote in my hand as a flashlight, and I could crawl around on my knees. After a minute or so there you really don't see that it's a rendering. Next, they demoed a factory that you could walk around in a bit. You entered on the second floor on a platform. When I looked over the railing I was convinced it was a ten foot drop, even though it was just a projection.
They actually use this reality cube to help people with phobias, for instance for people with a fear of spiders they have a table with a spider on it that they can move around. One of the technicians told me they hacked Quake and Unreal Tournament on there, but that most of them couldn't last more than fifteen minutes without nausea.
I really hope the MS Hologlass thing will provide a similar experience. It can be truly amazing.