Then you use those cameras to address your audience during live streams or captured events. It's not a static system you can be your own director and editor, in real time. In the final implementation you can turn on the spectator mode, see multiple cameras in-game, move them around with your hands to set up interesting shots using the in-game viewfinder for each and then stream from in-game and move from the point of view of each camera by squeezing the HTC Vive's controller. 'So he were are.' This changes everything 'I think we have a solution,' he told me. He implemented the features for spectator mode in the past couple of weeks, shot the video yesterday morning, and then picked up the phone to call us to say he might have solved the problem of spectating VR since I was complaining about that problem on social media. 'The next step was the players wanted to throw something at the camera or grab it, so we had to do that. You know you're in camera, and in the shot, and it was just perfect,' he said. 'People then popped into the game, they saw the camera, and they waved at it. He took it a step further, and modeled a viewfinder for the camera so you can see, inside VR, what the camera sees. 'So I just thought I should give the camera a physical manifestation in the game,' he recalls.

Where was the camera in virtual space, exactly? They couldn't see it. only to be told the player didn't know where to look. He had someone look at the camera and wave. He modeled the VR headset where the head should be, and he began having someone play-test the experience of playing for an audience. The first time they tested it he saw the amount of human emotion that was conveyed just by watching the player's virtual hands. but what does that look like?' Schwartz asked. 'So how can we get a view from the corner of the room. They made the decision to try to not only show the viewer's point of view, but the player themselves. Gaming is a social business these days, and making a game that could be streamed online well is a huge advantage. It was a good solution, but around a month before launch they decided to add the smoothing feature into the game itself through a button press, so people could stream the game or capture video comfortably. This was purely an experiment that would allow them to cut trailers that looked a bit more professional. Schwartz created a sort of virtual, invisible camera that just followed the movement of the player's head while smoothing out the motion. It's a weird fact, but capturing video from inside virtual reality shows us the limitations of actual first-person views. We think we know what real first-person view looks like, but it turns out the version that works in games and films is heavily modified from how we actually experience the world. 'You don't dolly, the way you would if you were holding a camera for a movie,' Schwartz said. Everything moves too fast and is hard to follow. It feels smooth to our brains because we're used to filtering all that movement and jitter out, but looking at raw footage coming from someone in VR is intolerable on a flat screen. We dart our eyes around, and both our head and our necks move when we turn our heads. The problem is that human beings experience the world in a very distinct way. looking back on that footage, I wish I could kill it with fire.' It was low quality, it was cropped weirdly.

'I was just straight-up recording the unwarped eye that was presented to the screen via Steam VR.

'Looking back on it, the footage looked like a pile of garbage,' Alex Schwartz, who describes himself as the CEO and Janitor of Owlchemy Labs, told Polygon. You can watch the game's first teaser for the game below: It's helpful to see how far they've come. So what could they offer every player who wanted to try to capture video or stream themselves inside the game? The journey to player-controlled VR streaming The results were pretty amazing.īut that required a lot of external equipment and wasn't much of a solution for the players themselves. They've experimented with green screens and mixed reality trailers, using much of the groundwork laid by Northway Games. How do you show someone what it's like to be in virtual reality? It's a problem that has been bothered Owlchemy Labs, creator of the upcoming HTC Vive title Job Simulator.

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