So you’ve been hearing of Virtual Reality more and more recently. VR seems to be the current buzz word, with 2016 heralded as the year of VR. You’ve read some articles, but lots of terminology feels confusing and some of the messages seem to contradict one another.

Still, you are eager to learn more and try Virtual Reality for yourself.

Welcome.

In this series of articles I am going to walk you through some of the basic concepts related to VR. Whether your end goal is to kick back, relax, and simply enjoy some VR content, or to create your own experiences and share them with others – this guide will help you understand all the basics and develop the vocabulary needed to understand and discuss VR.

As always, feel free to browse through QubaHQ.com for VR-themed articles covering more complex topics, tools, experiments, and content I’ve created or curated. If you have any feedback on this series or would like to suggest a topic for a future installment, feel free to drop a comment down below or shoot me an email.

Once again, welcome to the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to VR.

Let’s get started.

What does it all mean?

Virtual Reality is a fairly new topic in the public’s mind and not many conventions have been established yet. Different sources will understand and use the term in different ways, and there isn’t really one correct way of doing so.

To make matters more confusing, many content providers wanting to capitalize on the popularity of VR slap the label wherever they can, even if it’s completely meaningless – a situation similar to the overuse of phrases such as quantum (2002) or gluten-free (2014).

I too find myself applying the VR label in a particular way that simply feels right to me, but more on that later.

The standard classification

Listed below are various steps – from traditional TV/cinema to the completely immersive MxR (basically a holodeck). Each next step is more complex than the previous, as well as more immersive. You might have even experienced some of them already!

• Traditional 2D Media (no tracking)
  This is your ordinary, old-school content. Video, TV, cinema – presented on a flat surface or a device. The content lives within a defined frame that can only show you a part of the scene at any given time. The content author decides where to point the camera and what to focus on at any given time.

• 3D Media (no tracking)
  Pretty much the same thing, but with the added illusion of depth. Common examples include 3D IMAX movies, or specially-labelled Blu-ray Discs that require you to wear a pair of light glasses – from the old red/cyan ones to the more current polarized or active shutter lenses. Some devices like the Nintendo 3DS will allow you to observe depth without glasses, as long as you position your head in the right spot. 3D content can feel more immersive than traditional 2D, but the image is framed, and the director controls what you will be looking at.

• Photospheres, Spherical Video, 360° Content [Mono] (rotation tracking)
  You probably first experienced this via Google Maps Street View. A 2D panorama of the scene is stretched on a sphere and the viewer can observe it from the center. On a computer you can use your mouse to rotate the view, while on mobile and HMD devices the gyroscopes translate your rotation and turn your device into a window/portal you can look through.

  This the most popular “VR” format these days due to a relatively low barrier to entry. Any modern mobile phone can capture and stitch together a Photosphere in just a couple of minutes. Dozens of 360° camera rigs are available off-the-shelf and you can watch years’ worth of content on YouTube’s #360video channel.

• Stereoscopic 360° (rotation tracking)
  The viewer is still located in a center, with the content projected around them. This time however, slightly offset images are projected on the spheres for each eye, creating an illusion of depth in the scene. You can look around a completely believable world, but not move around it. Simple interactions such as tapping and activating objects can be added to the experience.

  To experience Stereoscopic 360° content, you need to use a special viewer or HMD (Head-Mounted Display). Thanks to the relatively low amount of real-time computation required, this type of experience is very popular on mobile platforms with budget viewers such as Google Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear VR. Content (photos, videos, animation, real-time) can be either downloaded and played locally or watched online.

• Virtual Reality [Local] (rotation and limited position tracking)
  In addition to observing the world, the user can now move around, although in limited capacity. The movement may range anywhere from how far you can lean in your chair, to walking within a space about as wide as two yoga mats put together. The content is rendered in real-time (typically using game engines) and requires relatively beefy hardware to push all the frames to the viewer.

  Most of these experiences are now interactive, allowing you to navigate and manipulate the virtual world. Many of the experiences crafted for Oculus Rift (DK2 and higher) or PlayStation VR fall into this category and will most likely become the dominant form of VR for a while. Typical hardware requires a computer (to process the data), an HMD, a tracking camera, and often a controller.

• Room-scale Virtual Reality (rotation and extended position tracking)
  Currently lead by HTC Vive, this system allows you to experience all of the above (real-time, responsive, immersive, 3D, stereoscopic world) but with the added bonus of relatively extensive mobility. You can now stand up from your chair and freely walk around the space. The system will even warn you whenever you’re about to bump into your real world furniture.

  In addition to the HMD, you are now also equipped with controllers in each hand, making the interaction much more intuitive, compared to standard input devices like mouse, keyboard or a gamepad.

• Augmented Reality (rotation and position tracking)
  While VR replaces the real world with a simulated one, AR augments the real world with additional information. This new layer of data is rendered on top of a see-through viewer. It does not need be a head-mounted stereoscopic viewer (although it as well may be). Augmented Reality may be as simple as face detection on your photo camera or as complex as a jet pilot’s HUD (Heads-up Display) displaying information directly onto the visor of the helmet.

• Augmented Virtuality (multiple types of sensors)
  It took me a while to decide whether to add AV to this list. Technically it is not a method of presenting content, but rather of capturing input. Still, just to have an “academically” complete list, I will give it a quick mention. If you think of Augmented Reality as adding digital data and objects to the real world, Augmented Virtuality does the opposite – it captures real world objects (and their behavior) to affect a digital world. Actions like tilting your phone to steer a car in a racing game or striking a pose in front of XBOX Kinect camera are examples of AV interaction.

• Mixed Reality (real, augmented and virtual, all hand in hand)
  This is the end-goal. The Star Trek Holodeck. The experience where the world surrounding you and another crafted by artists, engineers, UI and UX designers come together seamlessly. Currently the closest iteration in existence is Microsoft’s HoloLens. We still have a long way to go, but in the end we expect to have experiences where one can not only see and interact with digital objects in real world, but also feel them and use them to affect the real world and vice versa.

…but that’s still some years away.

Where does Virtual Reality begin

While most people agree on the above definitions of media types, not everyone agrees on which ones truly count as Virtual Reality. For some, to be considered VR, an element of interaction needs to be present. For others, the ability to move around a space is the essential definition of VR.

Many lean towards classifying VR based not on the content itself but the way it is consumed. Following this method, a photosphere observed on a computer monitor would not be considered VR, but the same photosphere viewed through, say, Google Cardboard, with all of your vision filled by the content, would be.

Personally, and I cannot stress this enough – this is simply my point of view – I have two requirements: Rotational tracking and stereoscopy. Having experienced monoscopic photospheres for many years, my eyes recognize their lack of depth, causing my brain to automatically reject the experience as not real. Give me some depth to the scene while letting me freely look around it and you got me – I feel present in the scene, even if I am looking at a still image.

Next time on Absolute Beginner’s Guide to VR…

I hope you enjoyed this introductory chapter of my Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Virtual Reality. I know it was a lot of terminology at once, but it was necessary to establish a solid foundation we can build upon. If you found any parts of the chapter unclear, feel I’ve made a mistake, or simply want to strike up a conversation, feel free to leave a comment down below and I will do my best to get back to you soon.

In the next chapter, I’ll focus on consumer’s side of VR and discuss the different headsets either already available on the market or coming in 2016. Hopefully it may help you pick your first HMD. In later installments you can expect topics such as player apps, VR video hosting websites, authoring tools, camera rigs, compression, engines, practices and many more. Parallel to this series of articles, visit QubaHQ.com for more advanced topics or follow me on Facebook and Twitter for updates, news, and an occasional look behind the scenes of my work-in-progress projects.

Credits

Written and compiled by Quba Michalski for QubaHQ/QubaVR
Edited by Greg Schram
Illustrations by ChiChiLand

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to VR by Quba Michalski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Click the button above to learn more.

Come join me on Thursday, February 18at 7PM – 9PM at Adobe Systems Inc in Seattle for a talk about some cool toys I’ve been building inside After Effects. Organized by After Effects Seattle, in this three-part presentation I will demonstrate how to push After Effects to do things it was not designed to do – building your own unique rigs and effects.

In part one he will debut his latest effect: QubaHQ Topo. In part two – demonstrate a process behind my artwork “Indifference 90K”. Finally, we will dive in for an in-depth look at creating stereoscopic 360° rig using C4D, AE and absolutely zero 3rd party plugins.

Sign up on Facebook and join us for an evening of nerding out over design, scripting and free prizes!

As I shift my creative focus away from traditional 2D/framed media and towards 360° video and VR, I find myself in need of good ambient sound more and more frequently. In the world of traditional motion design and film, good music was king. Adding a catchy tune to a piece could make or break its success, and entire careers were built on the ability to sync up visuals to the rhythm and sounds of the audio track.

Now, with the advent of Virtual Reality the priorities have changed. Establishing audience’s sense of presence is the key component of crafting a successful experience. Generally speaking, it is a good practice to take your time immersing the viewer in your world – and well-crafted soundscape is as important as the visuals in establishing the believably of the virtual world.

While nothing will substitute a good audio track created by a professional sound engineer, Ambient Mixer is an online service that’s ideal for rapid prototyping. It comes in extremely handy whenever you need to lay in a basic atmospheric sound, but still want to customize it to fit your particular needs.

 

Ambient Mixer can be accessed through a browser at www.ambient-mixer.com/, or via free and paid mobile versions (on iOS and Android). At the heart of the service is a simple 8-channel stereo mixer loaded with just enough functionality to create a soundscape that’s rich and unique. The output may not have the fidelity of a professional studio mix, but should satisfy all non-audiophile listeners just fine.

The mixer can play back any one of hundreds of sound samples already available in the Ambient Mixer’s library, or user’s own files that were uploaded to the service. Once loaded into the app, each channel offers basic volume and Left-Right panning controls as well as three playback modes: Your sample can be looped, crossfaded or randomized.

Looping is simple enough – once the sample ends, it will start again. If simple looping does not create a seamless repetition, you may enable the crossfade option – the sample will then fade out towards the end, simultaneously fading in the next repetition. It works for most of longer recordings.

Finally, for some extra sounds you may not want playing back non-stop you can apply the randomize option. All you need to enter is the frequency and the time period and the app will take care of the rest. Setting frequency to 5 and period to 10m will make the sample randomly play 5 times over the period of 10 minutes. 1 and 15s will make it play once inside each 15 second period, or 4 times within each minute.

If you don’t feel like building your own, the site has a vast library of user-created atmospheres, ranging anywhere from nature to the matrix, indoors to outdoors, underwater to otherworldly.

Once you are satisfied with your mix, you can save it and then purchase a 192kbit, 44.1kHz MP3 of it. At the moment of writing this article, Ambient Mixer charges $5 for a 15min render, $9 for 30min and $16 for 1 hour. Registering to the site and subscribing to their newsletter will yield you a one time $5 voucher, good for a single 15 minute clip purchase.

A good ambient atmosphere will help immerse your audience in the world you are crafting, effectively doubling the number of senses the VR experience is fooling. While still very far from proper ambisonics, a proper soundscape (even a stereo one) will enhance your VR content and help the viewers feel present in the scenes you craft. A good audio can also help with scene to scene transitions and editing cuts in VR, but that’s a topic for another conversation…

OTOY’s Octane Render outputs stereo 360 in a side-by-side (L:R) configuration only. Most stereoscopic 360 video players prefer to stack the left and right eye view on top of one another using the top-bottom (T:B) layout. One of the players I use has never exited a beta version and likes the reverse-stacked arrangement with left eye on the bottom and right on top (B:T), while some viewers want to experience the content without any additional hardware and simply by crossing their eyes on the screen for the right-left (R:L) config…

To simplify the process of converting the stereoscopic images from one layout to another, I created a series of Adobe Photoshop Actions named QubaVR Stereo Swapper, that will allow you to re-arrange your frames with a single (or at most double) click.

After downloading QubaVR Stereo Swapper, simply unzip the Photoshop Actions (.atn) file into your presets folder, open Photoshop, and load it from your Actions Palette.

Four new actions should now be available to you under the QubaVR Stereo Swapper folder. Simply open up your image and play the appropriate action. The names should be self-explanatory: L:R -> T:B will change left-right image into top-bottom, for example, while T:B B:T will swap top and bottom halves of your image.

Please note, that as a part of the action, your layer set will be flattened!

That’s it, really. Simple little tool that will save you 30 seconds every time you use it, adding up to hours in no time!

Download QubaVR Stereo Swapper

• http://downloads.qubahq.com/QubaVR_Stereo_Swapper.zip

The QubaVR Stereo Swapper Photoshop Actions were made using Photoshop CC 2015.1.1 and may not be compatible with earlier versions. You are allowed to use this tool free of charge on personal and commercial projects. You are not allowed to redistribute, bundle or sell this tool for profit.