By Scott Singer
Panel: "Authoring Reality"
Andrew Melchior, Creative Director at "Third Space Agency" gave a great overview of the challenges involved in the making of Bjork's VR pieces for the Museum of Modern Art. The results are a truly visually-compelling experience.
Autodesk's reality capture tools featured heavily in creating the environments used in the piece. Brian Pene, Autodesk's director of emerging technology, gave a brief but informative look at their Memento tools and workflow for using photogrammetry to create digital production assets.
Eric Hanson of xRez Studios in Santa Monica, talked about their approach for using reality capture to create highly-detailed environment assets for the Black Lake segment of the experience. Starting from a proof of concept shoot in California, he and his team figured out how best to capture and leverage the thousands of photos necessary to get accurate results. That knowledge was then taken to the rugged terrain of Iceland as part of the location shoot. The results brought a level of realism and visual sophistication critical to the project.
A huge component of any compelling immersive media experience is audio. And Varun Nair of "Two Big Ears" talked about some of the new audio technology they developed to bring a sense of audio depth to Bjork's VR experience. Two Big Ears, developed novel techniques of positioning sound elements in space that could be edited in a standard Audio Workstation and previewed in virtual space using a VR head mounted display. By attaching meta-data to the audio elements, the rich soundscape could be delivered as a fully immersive, surround experience, that tracks and responds to the user's changing orientation and point of view.
Scott Singer is a Digital Effects Supervisor with Tippett Studio. He can be reached by email at: ssinger@tippett.com.