Zero Point, a Virtual Reality film

This article was taken from the July 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Visual-technology startup Condition One's mission is simple enough -- it hopes to convey one person's experience to another, as purely as possible. The company's first full virtual-reality movie, Zero Point, created for the Oculus Rift 3D headset, is in edit and ready for pre-order via the company's site. "My whole career has been about making people feel they were there," explains Condition One founder Danfung Dennis. "Virtual-reality documentaries will allow us to tell stories at a visceral level."


Dennis began his career as a photojournalist covering Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times. Finding that his best shots rarely made the page -- and that his Canon Mark II shot HD video -- he moved into documentary for greater control over the distribution of his stories. His first film -- Hell and Back Again -- follows Sergeant Nathan Harris during a firefight in Afghanistan and recovering from his wounds back in North Carolina. It won awards, but Dennis found it "too flat and passive to create the immersive, empathic and compassionate experience I was after." Condition One followed, founded in San Francisco in 2010 with backing from billionaire Mark Cuban, among others. It was initially designed to use the iPad's gyroscope to allow viewers to physically control the camera's perspective in movies. But, when Oculus Rift launched in 2012, the company realised that the platform offered the experience it was trying to achieve.

Zero Point -- a virtual-reality documentary about the history of virtual reality -- uses ring of RED cameras capturing 360-degree shots in 5k video at 60 frames per second. Weighing 34kg, the rig isn't going into the battlefield any time soon, but Dennis says there's more to do before that takes place anyway. "We have to change the whole language of film," he argues. "The frame no longer exists. We have to learn from games culture. The goal remains, though -- to put you in someone's shoes to help you understand them better."