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Facebook Finally Delivers On the VRML Dream With Immersive Star Wars Video
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has launched its 360-degree video feature, with an eye to virtual reality and next year's release of the Oculus Rift. Among the showcase videos is a specially rendered 'fly-through' of a scene from new Star Wars movie 'The Force Awakens', allowing the viewer to pan laterally and horizontally as the movie progresses. This kind of immersive video was made possible with Apple's QuickTime VR in the 1990s, but was hampered by the same technological bottlenecks of the period as VRML.
Do you really want to restrict the choice of camera angles to a decision made by a highly experienced professional artist? Surely I should be given the freedom to accidentally be looking the wrong way as a major plot point unfolds, because then I get an individualised experience of "what the hell is happening here?!?"
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Which raises an interesting question -- if I'm out when the 360-degree film is broadcast, am I going to have to set the viewing angles for the DVR to avoid unnecessary hard-drive usage...?
It's not a technological problem. The real issues with this kind of technology is that it removes direction from the movie. Directors use different angles, aspect ratios, focal lenghts, etc to direct and control the viewer's attention. How do that do that if the viewer is in control of the camera.
They may partially try to do that and then you end up with the stupid situation like that scene in Avatar where the main character wakes from cryo. It was a classic change of focus from a water droplet to the main character, but in 3D it was distracting as heck as I was trying to focus on the water droplet but couldn't. This would not be helped if I could move the camera to not even look at the character in the first place.