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A UK production company and visual effects studio have announced the launch of Alchemy VR, a branch dedicated to creating content for the likes of Oculus Rift and Sony's Morpheus. And they're beginning with a David Attenborough documentary on Earth's early life.

Atlantic Productions and its sister VFX studio Zoo have been responsible for some of the most stunning visuals on the small screen and IMAX, from David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive 3D to Bafta award-winning Flying Monsters 3D. It has been high on Wired.co.uk's wish list to see an Attenborough-style documentary in the VR world, coming up close to the ocean's giants or smallest bugs, and it looks as though that is what Alchemy plans to deliver.


The new studio will draw on Atlantic Productions' more than two decades experience of documentary-making to create educational stories using a combination of "live action 3D, 360 videos and fully immersive CGI worlds". These projects, both with Sony and Oculus Rift, are already underway and include a David Attenborough documentary on the first animals that lived on Earth. "David is enjoying working out how we can tell stories in VR,"

Anthony Geffen, CEO of Alchemy VR, told Wired.co.uk. "He has always liked new technology. Particularly when they tell stories in a fresh way and make them more immersive." Apparently Attenborough is "very excited" about both Oculus Rift and Morpheus, and we can see why after hearing the few hints the Alchemy VR team passed our way about the upcoming production.

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Apparently the team has had great fun playing with scale -- "we can make people feel truly massive, or we can make people feel incredibly small," Creative Director of Alchemy Phil Harper tells us. "We had this idea of placing people into a scene in which the creatures around them are no larger than a playing card, but to alter perspective to interpret the world on that much smaller scale. It worked quite nicely, and suddenly very tiny creatures took on a whole new meaning."

The first programme, he says, is based on several creatures the team had already built from the Cambrian ocean, around 550 million years ago. At that time, the ocean was vastly more populated than land -- it was where life was emerging, including the earliest arthropods. The team thought, when designing those creatures -- "wouldn't it be cool if you could meet these guys face to face?" "So that's what we started doing," said Harper, "and the project snowballed from there. The journey literally takes you back in time to another world. We're really excited about it."


Given the subject matter, much of the programme will be computer-generated, partially, explains Harper, because with VR "there's this desire to give people something they simply cannot get at all in real life". "Sure you could go and jump out of a plane. But how about going on a dive 400 million years ago? That kind of stuff just isn't possible at all, but Virtual Reality makes it possible for us to give people those experiences, which is very exciting. In many ways computer generated experiences are easier to get right as we found in our first 3D productions."

Alchemy VR believes with the combined experience and assets of Atlantic Productions and Zoo, it's well-placed to venture into VR -- it's not a financial plunge, considering all the modelling and VFX groundwork it already has.

Now, although Wired.co.uk has been looking forward to the first Attenborough VR experience, we did have our reservations after being plunged into the deep blue depths and attacked by a grizzly Great White with a hankering for human flesh (thanks to Sony's Morpheus). We're assuming a few ancient creatures bobbing in the early ocean won't be quite so alarming, but is Alchemy VR tempering its content to avoid this kind of terror-fuelled result? "Well there's always going to be those concerns," said Harper. "The same was said of the cinema screen with people screaming at the sight of a train. Those pieces of content which scare the audience will definitely find their place -- we're actually really interested by horror, thriller and suspense, because obviously VR is going to make those experiences even more terrifying." "We can't lose sight of the other end of the spectrum -- it's still there -- and the audiences are going to demand it just as much. We showed the Tuscany Villa demo to one of the team's mothers and she giggled in awe. She understood it immediately. 'I just want to sit in Italy and have a glass of wine,' she said. We were impressed with how quickly she understood what VR meant -- that we can now take people to the most beautiful places in the world.

That's a very cool thing, and we're sure that an audience is going to grow around this concept very soon."


And the tech is nearly there, Harper believes, to share this experience with the public everywhere. We have high-end devices like Morpheus, and then there's Google Cardboard. "It's early days for sure, but I remember the early days of mobile phones. The 'early days' really didn't last long once they were affordable, and VR already looks like it's going to be affordable for millions of people. If that doesn't excite content creators I don't know what will."

Harper believes it's, in fact, the creative industry that is actually having to play catch up now. When he first tried the latest headsets, he instantly knew "it was going to be a very cool medium". "Some people put the Dev Kit 1 on and only saw a screen door effect, a few technical problems, and a headache. I suppose there are others who put it on and immediately see the potential of immersing audiences in an environment. It's a very powerful thing and for creative companies who are looking into it, it's a very exciting time."

The first sets obviously had their issues, but he believes "Dev Kit 2 doesn't feel much like a dev kit any more".

Even so Harper does not predict that VR will replace home theatres everywhere. "People said that about 3D, but they were wrong. It just has its place and it has its audience. No one wants to watch the weather in 3D, and no one is going to want to watch the weather in VR. Or maybe they would, who knows..." "What makes VR unique is that you can watch HD content in there, you can watch 3D content in there, and you can also have incredible VR experiences... All of these changes in technology are great, but they are forever going to be reliant on storytellers, which for a company like us is great news! I suppose the reason VR gets people so excited is that it really does feel very different, it's not like the change from SD to HD. It's a vast leap forwards, we just have to make sure we deliver great content now!"

CEO Geffen says there is also an ancient world in the making, for a future production, after the University of Arkansas shared some of its preserved exhibits with them for data capture. Earlier this year the University of Michigan launched its Online Repository of Fossils, featuring high-resolution photos, CT scans and photorealistic 3D imaging of a selection of its fossil collection, including a Mammut americanum. Imagine that kind of database, but brought to life through VR.


But Alchemy is just getting started, talking with major broadcasters to see how VR can be incorporated and working on a whole secret schedule beyond the first Attenborough outing. "The amount of ideas we've got here at Alchemy is starting to spiral out of control, which is something we're pleased with!" said Harper. "Because there's essentially nothing that's been properly

'done' in VR, there are endless stories waiting to get told. All of the grammar of storytelling needs figuring out too, but again, we keep coming up with ideas on how to navigate that. Now we are going to tell factual stories which place the viewer in the scene. That's because of our roots have come from 21 years of telling leading documentaries. We know we can do something which is truly powerful.

We're looking across a number of genres and formats, the possibilities in VR are endless and we have carte blanche to develop them."