Oculus, the creator of the Rift VR headset, announced its first movie made specifically for VR at the Sundance Film Festival. “Lost” is a short animated movie that has been created to help Oculus convince Hollywood to make big movies for VR.
Oculus wants a ”VR cinema”
The Oculus Rift was originally created primarily for gaming, but has proven to be capable of far more. People involved generally consider VR an entirely new medium, which can be used for movies, games, communications, work and more.
After Facebook bought the company for $2 billion in 2014, all eyes are on Oculus. At the annual Sundance Film Festival, Oculus announced that it has created Story Studio; an initiative to explore and create movies in VR. The first one to come out of the studio is an animated film called Lost that varies in length from 3 to 10 minutes depending on how fast you move forward in the VR world.
When Oculus approached Hollywood to demonstrate what VR can do, the company learned that they first need to figure out what “VR cinema” actually is and can be. So they went back to the office and created Story Studio. Story Studio currently employs around 10 people, including a former Pixar employee Saschka Unseld.
Oculus has learned that while traditional film language is mostly a one-way road, dictated by the movie director, VR cinema can give the viewer the control to explore and decide. That fundamentally sounds like a story-driven game, but Oculus believes that it could work for movies, too.
Story Studio hopes to release around four projects in 2015, and appears to have ambitions to create more ambitious VR cinema projects in the coming years.
The consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset has not been released yet and no announcement date has been set, but you can read our review of the second developer kit here.
- Source: Oculus via The Verge
