cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Rift Media Player

Frank1000
Explorer
Hi,
here’s Frank Hassani, I'm into art and docu exhibitions and interested to know if there is a VR-Player that can playback pre-produced (hours of rendering time per frame) 360° spherical movie. In such terms that the user is taken on a journey (following the movie) while being able to turn the head to any direction.

The 2 options I'm thinking about are:

a) The pre-produced movie contains real-life footage, so only head rotations are affected in the view. The camera stand point always is limited to 1 per timeline.

b) The VR-movie is generated by 3D and has a range of related camera stand points per time in the movie timeline, which then are played back according to the users body and head-translations. In this case the player would need to manage the different view points in time.

Kyle from Oculus has pointed me to the VR Cinema 360, which is a nice single cam solution for the case a). Is someone working on a VR-Player for case b), with multiple cam standpoints ?

Regards,
Frank
8 REPLIES 8

genetransfer
Explorer
not sure how 3d would work in a 360 video but sounds interesting and I'm sure someone will be working on it. I suppose for translation you could interpolate between camera's like they did for "bullet time" in the matrix, but then I can only image the hard drive space you would need. cool idea though.

Frank1000
Explorer
ya exactly, if you would pause the playback, this would create the Matrix effect, while when movie continues playing, it places you with all your movement inside the living scene. Depending on the available pre-produced movies from multiple camera standpoints, you could walk around within a greatly, non-real-time rendered scenery while it's playing.

I'd much be interested to develop this player with someone who's a coder. I'd be happy to focus on feature development for it.

Frank

Mark79
Honored Guest
There's another app called VR-Player. It's free and comes with a lot of custom settings. Ones you get used to it, you can play many different formats and optimize it for your needs.
Multiple cam standpoints might work in quicktime format. I've seen some flash-applications using this method.
Architectural visualisation making use of interactive flash-movies, for example. Also, html5 supports 3D very well (not sure, if there's an inoffical rift-support yet).

Frank1000
Explorer
ok wonderful, thx Mark

Frank

genetransfer
Explorer
if you have a set path already created it's not that bad, I created my own 360 player last night (just had to know) but for real-time shifts (dynamic/user defined) I really don't think that will be possible compute wise, getting true interpolation between video in real-time would just be too intense. so in effect you'd be better just filming in 360, 2d and letting the user look around and even use positional tracking with some parallax(experience on rail's type of thing). Even with the matrix they had to make 3d meshes for use with the interpolation of frames between cameras, so the compute power required to do bullet time real time (forward, backward, slowed down, sped up along the rail) would be exponential. but diffidently the future of movies, my mum loved avatar as she saw it in 3d at the theatre and I saw it on the small screen in 2d and wondered what everyone raved about, but this concept if realised would be awesome especially for replay value, as I find myself (as I watch reruns of sitcoms) looking at the background actors and wonder what they are talking about so there is a lot of potential to video 360 that's for sure.

Frank1000
Explorer
my project being in the preliminary state, I'm waiting for the advanced consumer version to get my first Rift, so don't have one to determine from experience yet, but for the multi-standpoints pre-production i come across these thoughts:
* curious about the extent to which standpoints can be thinned out and be replaced with interpolations to reduce the render-time for the production.
* how and at which distance between standpoints, interpolations start to be annoying.
* which 3D-matrix subtlety the Rift has, to determine how many standpoints are to be served to the user
* if it’s about a still picture, this may be even not that much standpoints and could be practically rendered without a render-farm
* if interpolating is too resource hungry in real-time, then the interpolation could be pre-produced as well.
* the required bandwidth / latency of the VR-player hardware / software for fluent switching between a huge number of standpoint streams on the storage media.
* if addressing images out of the (yet to be determined) probably vast amount of standpoints causes big latency problems.
* if yes, if pre-caching streams of close by standpoints can help to bring latency down to the required level

ib
Honored Guest
Hi everyone,
I'm new to this but I am interested in a similar project: I would like to film a specific area and have people use my Oculus rift to view it in a 360 fashion. The idea is to avoid the person physically having to be there while experiencing the same thing I did when I viewed the place. Not sure what I would need to purchase in addition to a standard camera to make this happen or even if it is possible but any opinion would help!
Again I am new to this and I hope I wrote this in the appropriate place but after some research, your project seemed to be the closest to what I had in mind.
Thanks in advance for your help and support!

Roaster
Rising Star
I don't see how it's possible to virtualize a real life scene using cameras and images and still give the user anything other than directional view choice. Their path through the environment must be constrained to the path the cameras took, or you have to synthesize what was behind that rock or tree or door.
Either the camera has to go everywhere, or the viewer is on a track.
The answer would seem to be that the environment has to be fully CG, and textured with images, or simply a spherical shell like a planetarium and the viewer motion controls the fwd/rev of the stitched together playback (one for each eye, of course).
The Oculus is perfect for controlling a pan/tilt camera platform though, so have a fleet of rent-a-drones at mount rushmore and let the user back east have a look. They already have autonomous return to home features, auto pilot stabilizers, altitude control and gps nav.
i7-5820K @ 4.2Ghz, water cooled, Asus X99-Pro USB 3.1, 48 Gb DDR4 2400, Samsung 950 pro M.2 SSD, GTX 980 Ti SC, 750w psu