Project Name: DREAM (Data Rules Everything Around Me)
Description: DREAM is one of the four “On Shanghai” VR projects in a NYU Shanghai Fall 2019 IMA course named VR/AR Fundamentals, completed by Ryan, John and Amy. It is a 360 video experience located at the center of Shanghai near the Pearl Tower in Lujiazui. What we wanted to express in this one minute experience is that everything in VR headset, or any technical equipments like computer, mobile or whatever nowadays, is composed of data and may vanish and collapse. We wanted to audience to get some futuristic and cyberpunk feelings from it.
Below is the 360 video:
Production: Firstly we started with getting used to a very “high-end” camera, Intsa 360 Pro 2. It was quite different with normal cameras but actually also very easy to use under the clear and in-order instructions. Then about the post-production, we went through the stitching them together, adding visual glitch effects pixel by pixel within certain areas and attempting to modify spatial audio. Stitching six files into a full 360 video was also easier than expected with present mature application, for the reason we have discussed in class how hard manual stitching was before the new camera like Insta 360 and application came out several years ago. About the effects, greatest thanks to my teammates’ hard working. Though I didn’t participate in this part much, I also explored a lot in post-production’s effects on a normal video by myself and got a taste about how powerful Premier Pro is to modify even just from pixel level. The VR toolset in Premier Pro can do more than we expected and gave us a great experience to try “movie-like” effects though ended with requiring more workloads, totally in expectation. The spatial audio in the end was not achieved because of time limits either. Anyway, the outcome is quite satisfying, especially with the demoing reactions in IMA Show.
Demoing: The hardest part while demoing our project was in fact to introduce a zero-VR-experience user how to use a VR headset. They need to immediately know how to use the controller and how to chose and click in their own views. Fortunately all of them got used to it very quickly. It was a huge paid-off when you saw their exciting and “wow” reactions while watching the one-minute video. Some users even had questions after the experience, like “What course this project was made for?”, “How did you make this”, “Do you have more to show” and so on. We all believe VR experience will get more and more popular and if this short one-minute experience can trigger more people’s interests, we have succeeded.
Below is the documentation video intercut with the project and demoing reactions: