In 2016 I got a call from Elliot Grove, “Come be our guinea pig in this new workshop we’re doing”, and my response probably was along the lines of “Sure what’s the worst that can happen?”, in fact, it was the opposite – that phone call changed the course of my career. I had just finished an editing internship at Raindance Film Festival and had eyes for traditional filmmaking and linear storytelling. Unbeknownst to me, overnight millionaire Palmer Luckey had just invented the new Oculus VR headset and was immediately bought out by Meta née Facebook. This, gyroscopes in mobile phones, and streaming platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube developing 360 streaming capabilities made 360 Video content a viable option. Enter the VR tech boom.
I joined a cache of Raindance members in the first 360 VR Storytelling Workshop and was hooked by the immediate results with a tiny crew of VR noobs, an hour of shooting, and a little more than that for editing. I loved opening up my perception of how a story could be told, and became enarmoured to the idea of environmental storytelling; using blocking, lighting, and audio queues to draw the audience into a tale. The principles from this very first workshop became applicable to all immersive storytelling – I just had to start.
I learned the principles of telling spherical stories; a departure from tight frames and quick cuts, audiences could find their own way in these narratives, and we had to craft something worthy of being found. The festival that year featured Virtual Reality experiences from both filmmakers and game developers alike, and ranged from highly fantastical, cumbersomely cabled rift setups, to 360 videos in head-mounted phone displays. I still remember the film presented at a dining table, and at certain points, the waiter would light and waft a candle under the nose of viewers intriguing the other senses. The quality of the tech didn’t matter, immersive content had an impact; and was here to stay.
As the need for immersive stories increased so did the quality of headsets available. Meta has just released their 3rd Quest (6th overall) headset after nearly 20 million of the Quest headsets sold. These are cheaper more accessible headsets ready for a wide variety of mixed reality experiences, and truly are an excellent way to enjoy 360 film.
Next year will see the rise of Apple’s Vision Pro, a headset that was never going to see the light of day until immersive tech meant something wearable, comfortable, and visually stunning was possible. One of the main barriers of entry for mixed reality headsets is the user interfaces, and Apple has dedicated hours of content on the Principles of Spatial Design, an excellent resource for XR developers looking to create seamless immersive content that’s accessible to anyone. It’s well worth a look before it gets thrown behind a paywall, and an excellent opportunity for anyone wanting to develop for their consumer-facing headsets such as the rumoured 2027 “Apple Glass”. These new glasses will mean immersive head-mounted content will be as readily available as anyone today who has a smartphone.
These solo experiences may be a turn-off – what about the all-important cinema? How do we make immersive stories a shared experience?
In London alone, there are dozens of immersive experiences opening their doors. A great example is David Hockney’s Immersive Exhibition “Bigger and Closer” at Lightroom in Kings Cross. A multidirectional autobiography, the experience showed how he moved through painting, and photography, to digital art drawn on 80 iPads and in King’s Cross was displayed for hundreds of people to enjoy simultaneously.
Outernet spent 16 years buying up a block of Tottenham Court Road to create a free open public space featuring floor-to-ceiling 8K 360 screens for massive immersive digital experiences. This brings virtual spaces into the physical and opens up possibilities for filmmakers to create immersive content with an expected footfall of up to 400,000 visitors a day. Imagine composing a massive loopable, layered narrative here that can be seen by thousands of people. Over the next few years, this project will be replicated in other big cities around the world and already has a competitor in the Las Vegas Sphere. Cities are littered with exhibition spaces waiting for the perfect stories to be told.
So what’s next in capture techniques? In recent years, motion capture, photogrammetry, and lidar scanning as well as volumetric capture has continued to support this technology and has only improved with time. When I started at Sky in 2017, David Attenborough had been volumetrically captured, and at the time there was only enough computing power to capture his top half, since then he’s featured in half a dozen immersive experiences where the whole body of David Attenborough leads you through immersive experiences, powered by VR, AR, 5G and more.
For camera-inclined filmmakers, stereoscopic broadcast quality livestream workflows are available with cameras such as the Kandao Obsidian Pro and Insta360 Pro. For the documentarian on the go (and my personal bread and butter) GoPro has made an excellent lightweight, 5.2K 360 camera in the GoPro Max, and has revealed it’s successor the GoPro Max 2 is in the works for release next year. These will be the centre point of Raindance’s next series of 360 Virtual Reality Storytelling workshops.
