Because it’s the best way to convey what it is actually like to be in virtual reality on a 2D screen. Translating the feeling of being in a fully interactive virtual environment onto a 4.7" screen on your iPhone is a difficult problem.

Creating a trailer where you’re showcasing first person footage from the head mounted display is the traditional method people have been using, and it gets you part way there. But it never really provides the viewer a sense of the scale or sense of presence of room scale VR.

When you see someone inside VR and interacting with their virtual environment, something clicks in your brain and the viewer understands it in a way that just isn't same with first person footage.

For Fantastic Contraption we explored three different methods of showcasing what it’s like to be inside VR playing the game.

We composited the player into the virtual environment We brought some of the virtual environment into the real world We film an in-game avatar inside the environment with a physical camera move created in the real world

Even if your game isn't the best fit for mixed reality footage (1, and 2), the same sense of immersion can be felt even by creating an in-game avatar that fits with the style of the game and creating camera moves around that character in the virtual space. I believe that for studios that don’t have the resources and budget to create full mixed reality trailers, this will be a great method to showcase their game in the best possible way. This is the method we chose to use for the Space Pirate Trainer trailer and Fantastic Contraption trailer for Oculus touch. You can read about that experience here and the pros/cons of doing it this way vs Mixed Reality.



When Colin approached me about making a trailer for Fantastic Contraption, we wanted to take their mixed reality streaming tech and push one step further. We wanted perfectly synched and composited footage of people in Fantastic Contraption building machines and having fun, while having a completely free camera that we could fly around them to evoke the feeling of what it’s really like to be inside the game.

Here’s how we did it and what was involved. (TL;DR - this is way more work than you’d ever imagine)