OTOY Will Change How You View the World

You will hear a lot of impressive things coming out of Oculus Connect 2, but it’s the little demo tucked away in a hotel room of the hotel from OTOY that is going to make huge waves.

Just recently, OTOY introduced support for videos and interactive media. However, if you have opened the newly updated ORBX Media Player app on Gear VR you might have noticed that there is no new content that takes advantage of these features to be found… yet. I was given the opportunity to check out two videos that I can’t utter a word of using this tech, and was allowed to sample an interactive navigable walkthrough of the Bat Cave. I also received some information on how live action light field content will in the not so distant future completely obliterate 360º videos as we know them today.

It was 5:30pm and I was up in a normal looking hotel room in the Lowes hotel about to experience something extraordinary. In front of me were 3 Gear VRs, and behind me was a computer with a Vive. Let’s start with the Gear VR videos I demoed. I won’t go into the technical details, but the quality of these short video clips were about the same as the current still OTOY video renders. The best way to think of them are like animated gifs, but the VR version of them. They repeated over and over again, and I wasn’t complaining one bit.

The first video was set in a Sci-Fi environment, and featured men running down a hallway towards me. A huge grin appeared on my face. Not only was I watching this short, beautiful clip, but I could pause the video at any time. Ok, yeah that’s pretty normal functionality. However, I was soon told I could also swipe forward on the Gear VR touchpad to move through the scene just like you are fast forwarding through a DVD, with each point I stopped at having the same quality as an OTOY render.

The next video was equally fantastic and set in a city. A man could be seen again moving to and from where I was in the short clip, and the effect was just as impressive. Now these videos are not small at all, reaching up into the gigabytes in size. OTOY intends to have both a download and streaming option for all of the interactive media. I was unable to try the streaming functionality, but was told it is comparable quality and most importantly not a strain on your bandwidth.

Next on the list was a still render, but one I could actually move through. This was honestly more impressive than the videos, and I can talk openly about this title. I was in the bat cave, yes, the same one that they have been talking about for almost a year. While complete freedom of movement is possible, this demo is something they put together just that morning, and I was able to just move back and forth along a line through the cave. Even this limited level of movement was surprisingly engaging.

I could stop at any point of the cave, and the motion was fluid, just as if you were moving in an FPS game. I moved up to the computer to get a better look, and then I just swiped and held forward on the touchpad while repeatedly moving on the same path through the bat cave and giggling to myself like I was a caveman seeing fire for the first time. This is when they stopped me and revealed that I could also actively change the lighting in the render. With a quick tap I was cycling through different light settings, going from night to day in the bat cave. I felt like a god.

The bat cave was over, and next up was the Vive. This was my first time actually using a Vive, which might have affected my levels of excitement for what was to follow. I held the controller in one hand and was able to peer into a cube, sphere, or whatever shape they wanted it to be, while swiping on the controller to change the size of the shape. I was looking at the same renders from the Enter the Metaverse contest, but with a fresh new perspective.

Before leaving, I just had to ask a few questions about my favorite topic, 360 degree video, or in OTOY’s case, light fields. During the Vive demo they showed some light fields taken of real world environments. These were images but I was interested in the light field video content.

We are not just talking 360º videos as we know them today. These will be videos that are navigable much in the same way that I walked through the bat cave. Imagine putting on your headset, being at your favorite band’s concert, and then walking right up to them and looking at them straight in the eye while they perform. I know this sounds like magic, but it is coming and very soon.

I knew they had been working video light fields, so I was curious as to when the average joe could create his own video light fields of something like their kid’s school recital in the same way that people take 360º videos right now. I thought I was being optimistic with my thoughts of this coming in the next 5 years.

It’s not going to be the next 5 years, I was told. We are looking at just a few years away from something like that coming out of OTOY, if even that long. They even suggest it could come within the next year. That’s right, the next year. It looks like my 360º video directory may need to be renamed the light field video directory in the near future.