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I suspect the Rift will force an interesting battle between pre-rendered and realtime graphics in film. Because of parallax effects, there is no way to pre-render footage for the Rift while still maintaining the level of geometric correctness the Rift provides. I suspect we'll see some pre-rendered 3d movies for the Rift, but they'll feel pretty weird.... It will be pseudo 3d, like current 3d films, not the true binocular, immersive, persistent-world effect that Rift games provide. With realtime rendering, however, you will get the complete, geometrically correct 3d images with head tracking. I suspect what this means is we'll start to see 3d films that are rendered in realtime. Essentially like the cutscenes we see for AAA video games, except they'd be feature length without any gameplay in between. If VR really takes off, we might even see companies like Pixar re-release their films for realtime viewing. I would love to see a company like Pixar produce new realtime 3d films for the Rift, but it seems unlikely that would make financial sense for them. I suspect what we'll see instead is indie shorts first, followed by larger and larger budget films. The same trajectory that CG films took in the first place. An interesting implication of this is that live footage will be basically impossible to incorporate into a true VR setting. As video resolution gets higher we may see multiple angles of scenes being recorded in ultra-high-def, and then digitally combined into a voxel scene. Probably data from something like the Kinect would have to be mixed in too, to resolve all of the voxels. That could be replayed on a Rift, but the director would have to really constrain the kind of lighting, materials, and motion for that to work well. It would be extraordinarily difficult, and I suspect you'd still have a lot of strange artifacts. This could actually be a big shot in the arm for pure digital film production! |
What would be the point of allow the user to move around (in a limited fashion anyhow) inside the movie? It doesn't improve storytelling (as games can by adding interactivity and perspective) - it strikes me as a gimmick, much like 3D films in general.
You get the whiz-bang coolness of "OMG I'm in this thing!", but ultimately it's a lot more gear than a straight-up television/movie screen for next to no gain. 3D movies had a few years of glory but is now deeply unpopular - I foresee the same for VR-movies.