Technicolor had several VR demos at NAB having been involved in 18 VR projects in the last year. One was the VR short tied to the TV show “24”. This was played out on a Gear VR headset. The audio was not working in my demo and I am not very impressed with the Gear VR headset in general, so have to give this a thumbs down.
More impressive was the short called “Wonder Buffalo”. For this, a outside-in volumetric capture of the main actor was done with her placed inside a virtual room. Wearing the HTC Vive headset, one is able to walk around the room and the actor. Jumps can be made with the hand accessory, which can also activate new animations. The story is about a girl who is overweight and bullied by her mother, so she draws paintings to escape. The short provides the visuals of the paintings and she sees in her head. While the CG was interesting, you could still see artifacts around the edges of the actor.
Intel’s demos included immersive VR and previews in virtual reality of AR Rahman’s Le Musk. 4K VR clips from the movie were being shown for the first time on three Cinema VR chairs in the Intel booth. Rahman said that they used Jaunt and Red cameras for the capture, but the “stitching was a nightmare.” He likes the “egg chairs” as this helps reduce motion sickness and helps create a narrative by controlling the point of view. The content ran for 25 minutes and we did not have time to take a look. These should be released in about four months for public viewing although locations were not specified.
Intel VR egg chairs added smell to the other senses
The “egg” chairs are actually made by Positron which calls them the Voyager Cinematic VR Chair. Voyager has incorporated haptic feedback, 3D spatial audio, and motion to the VR experience from the beginning. New for NAB is the addition of scent to the capabilities of the Cinematic VR chair. Rahman is the first director to take advantage of commissioned scents on the platform. The four-minute prelude to Le Musk features with three specially-designed scents by olfactory artist Grace Boyle, daughter of Academy Award-winning director Danny Boyle.
Intel was also showing how workstations powered by Intel Xeon processors can seamlessly stitch together content images captured with a GoPro Omni Rig in 8K into one 360º video that is viewed with a VR headset.
Nokia, Intel and Haivision teamed up to demo 4K VR live streaming. Haivision brought its new 4K live streaming service to the demo; Intel provided the computer power and Nokia, the content. A recording of a live concert was demonstrated in VR headsets.
Haivision said it KB 4K internet streaming encoder is now available with the Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2 (Intel VCA 2), which does media transcoding using the Intel Xeon Processor E3 v5. When equipped with dual 12G-SDI input and the Intel VCA 2, the KB 4K is capable of encoding dual 4Kp60 HEVC with synchronized stereoscopic streaming through MPEG-DASH.
Nokia’s 4K 3D 360 Ozo camera was used to capture live real-time stereoscopic 360º images with real time stitching. The demo also showcased the advanced streaming format playback powered by the Ozo Player SDK. – CC
