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My Neighbor Totoro In Virtual Reality
An anonymous reader writes "Nick Pitton, the developer behind the Spirited Away Boiler Room VR experience, has released his second project: the bus stop scene from Studio Ghibli's famous movie My Neighbor Totoro, once again in virtual reality for the Oculus Rift. Pittom 'hand-painted' the textures in Photoshop to recreated the painted-background feel of the movie. For the characters (Totoro and the Catbus) he used a cel-shaded approached to approximate the animated look from the movie. For his next project, he plans to recreate the ship and characters from the acclaimed anime Cowboy Bebop."
I couldn't help but notice:
- Input delay for head tracking (most probably due to Unity)
- Head tracking doesnt seem to match where he wants to look
- He's having to "flick" his head many times to "fix" the headtracking.
Back to basics and coding is whats needed here.
So it seems the Rift movies are in phase one still, where they experiment with replicating 2D movies in a 3D environment, and the result is about as boring as you'd expect. A bit like movie -> game (or vice-versa) conversions, you've really got to transform the work to fit the medium copying the scene verbatim with directionless self-insertion into the scene is pretty dull.
Based on my few minutes of thinking about it, I'm inclined to believe that the only way Rift "movies" will work is either as games or as replications of a play, where the user is stationary but can look around a scene in front of them from their vantage point. If you can't control at least part of the user's vision you're going to have a difficult time making a good movie – they could be looking in completely the wrong direction when something interesting happens, even with audio cues indicating where to look. A play allows the audience member to look around, but only in one major direction, which seems like it would fit the Rift pretty well. I guess this could include virtual concerts too; might even be able to do them in real-time with a good camera setup.
Your anonymous tirade has shown us all the way. I think you are exactly the type of rational, not-at-all-insane person we want to help us all as a society to make informed decisions about how best to reduce gun violence and the slaughter of children. If this obviously well adjusted person says gun control doesn't work, let's all listen to him and everyone else who is fighting to keep those Glocks, AR-15 assault rifles and other implements of death on our streets!
These scenes are pretty awesome, especially for anime fans. My girlfriend was a little apprehensive about trying out the rift, til I showed her the Boiler Room scene. I intend to let her see this one too, but I may wait for my dk2 to come in. The drift from the dk1 caused a fair bit of motion sickness for her after only a few minutes, and I don’t want to turn her off from VR completely. I know she’s a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop, so I suspect she’ll enjoy seeing that too.
Or you could, you know, just download the whole thing and run it yourself. It will display on screen, just like in the linked video, with no head-slab required.