VR/AR/MR TRENDS
EXPLORING THE VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES OF SOCIAL VR By CHRIS McGOWAN
TOP: Hanging out in VR in VRChat. (Image courtesy of VRChat) BOTTOM LEFT: Darshan Shankar, Founder and CEO, Bigscreen VR. BOTTOM RIGHT: Bob Buchi, President of Worldwide Home Entertainment, Paramount Pictures.
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When many people think of virtual reality, they tend to imagine immersive narratives, interactive experiences and games designed for that medium. Others ponder VR’s potential for education, training and therapy. Another of VR’s most compelling promises is that of Social VR, in which participants hang out, chat, interact and attend events together in virtual reality. They can even watch movies and concerts. Many are already immersing in 360-degree virtual spaces with friends and acquaintances. And many more will do it in the near future as VR quality improves and headsets become less cumbersome. Bigscreen VR and AltspaceVR are two platforms available now that offer a variety of social VR possibilities for entertainment and productivity. In Bigscreen VR, one can hang out, play and work, or go to the movies. Bigscreen’s main focus at the moment is to provide a different type of entertainment experience: the virtual cinema. Once logged into Bigscreen, users can sit in a dynamically-lit movie theater environment in virtual reality and watch movies together. Bigscreen VR Founder and CEO Darshan Shankar explains, “Bigscreen provides the immersion of a movie theater, since we also render a virtual world around the movie. This lets people feel like they are transported into a movie theater to watch a film on a massive projection screen, when in reality they’re sitting on their couch wearing a headset. Additionally, Bigscreen provides a social layer, enabling people to watch films together with friends and other movie fans around the world. Voice chat and avatars enable fun conversations, just like the social experience of watching a movie in a theater or living room.” Bigscreen offers studio films that cost $4 to $5 per admission. It has studio partnerships with Paramount Pictures and Funimation (Sony Pictures’ anime division) and has hundreds of titles. It has licensed films from Paramount such as Star Trek, Terminator and Transformers films, Interstellar, Top Gun, Ghost in the Shell, World War Z and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, with the pact covering multiple countries. “We are always looking for innovative ways to engage and entertain fans, and Bigscreen’s virtual reality platform offers viewers a new way to experience films in their homes,” comments Bob Buchi, President of Worldwide Home Entertainment for Paramount Pictures. He says the studio planned to make another 100+ movies available over the course of this year, on top of an initial 35+ titles. In addition to regular 2D screenings, Bigscreen presents 3D editions of select movies, which benefit from being shown in virtual reality. “When a person wears a VR headset and watches a 3D movie in Bigscreen, our software renders a crisp, high quality picture in each eye.” Those pictures are “perfectly aligned together, creating a 3D experience without common issues of 3D glasses such as cross-talk and ghosting. It’s subtle, doesn’t cause headaches and adds to the immersion of a film,” says Shankar. Bigscreen may also become the best home option for viewing movies in 3D because Netflix, Amazon Prime and most major streamers only offer the 2D version of feature films.
“User feedback to the 3D screenings has been particularly strong and we feel that Bigscreen offers an exceptional at-home 3D movie-watching experience,” Buchi comments. Bigscreen is now working on additional “VR Cinema” content, including a drive-in movie theater environment, and has had themed movie events like horror-movie weeks. There are also special events, such as in June when Paramount Pictures, director Ava DuVernay and Bigscreen VR partnered to bring Selma to viewers on the Bigscreen VR platform. There was a live movie screening in June and the movie was available for free that month. Bigscreen also has more than 50 free, ad-supported TV channels to watch inside the app, including CNN, Bloomberg, NBC and Comedy Central. It plans to add episodic TV,
TOP: Play Dungeons and Dragons in virtual reality in AltspaceVR. (Image courtesy of AltspaceVR) BOTTOM: Interstellar is shown in the virtual cinema by Bigscreen VR. (Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Bigscreen VR)
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