Viewers can move from watching films to inhabiting them, VR innovator claims
Hollywood studios are preparing to dive into their recent archives and reimagine scenes from some of their best films as fully immersive, 360-degree experiences on virtual-reality (VR) headsets. That is according to Gianluca Meardi, general manager at V-Nova Studios, the company that is making “volumetric” cinematic experiences possible without the motion sickness often associated with VR viewing.
Crucially, the cost to studios of adapting existing computer-generated (CG) films for 360-degree VR is equivalent to their adaptation costs when making content fit for Imax cinemas. Meardi believes this paves the way for rapid uptake and his studio was created last year to produce content that champions the PresenZ volumetric format developed by sister company V-Nova.
At least one major studio is already working on a commercial project to use the V-Nova immersive format.
V-Nova Studios has just released the first two short films made with PresenZ. These are available on the SteamVR platform, which largely serves gamers with games and community features.
Sharkarama: Guardian of the Oceans promotes marine conservation and takes the viewer to the depths of the ocean to see a shark graveyard caused by hunting. Weightless is an artistic sequence from Grammy-winning composer Diane Warren that features performer Arilena Ara. V-Nova Studios considers Weightless an example of how music promotional videos could evolve.
“For the first time, cinematic-grade visuals come with the freedom to move within hyper-realistic scenes, looking around or behind objects and characters in a way that standard formats cannot replicate,” V-Nova Studios declares.
The Media Leader was given a demonstration of the PresenZ-enabled volumetric viewing. As a viewer, wearing the VR headset, you are immersed within the video scene and are fully surrounded. If you look behind you, there is content. If an object stands before you, you can peer around it.
Giant robot fight
In one demo scene not yet released publicly, you stand inside a room where three giant robots are fighting, with their metal bodies slamming into the walls in front of you or at your feet. It is possible to move towards an object. There was outstanding detail on the robot armour on close inspection.
In another sequence (also unpublished), the user sails alongside a giant yacht in a beautiful lagoon.
As promised, when exiting the headset after around 30 minutes watching multiple demo sequences plus the first two commercial releases, there was zero unsteadiness and no sense of sensory disruption. Inevitably, the photos shown in 2D do not do justice to this concept.
The potential for studios is clear: they could take some of the best film sequences they have and turn them into a complementary format. Commercial studio deployments, when they come, will tell us whether there is consumer appetite to be terrified in close-up immersive drama or relaxed by gentle worlds full of furry characters.
Guido Meardi, CEO of V-Nova, reckons we are about to enter a new era in cinematic entertainment when audiences step inside films rather than just watch them: “We are redefining what immersive means.”
The technical term for the hyper-realistic video immersion is Six-Degrees-of-Freedom (6DoF), better known as volumetric viewing. It has been made possible thanks to a combination of point-cloud compression (a way to compress volumetric visual data) developed at V-Nova and the PresenZ technology that the company absorbed when it acquired Parallaxter in 2023.
PresenZ enables real-time navigation in pre-rendered scenes and so breaks viewers free from static viewpoints. One of the roadmap goals for V-Nova and V-Nova Studios is to enable the use of non-CG content in PresenZ.
ImmersiX app for VR headsets
Content being created in PresenZ is being made available in a proprietary V-Nova application called ImmersiX that, at least initially, will be the gateway to the new immersive content.
The app will be made available on VR platforms that in turn work with VR headsets. For example, ImmersiX is already available on SteamVR, where users can watch Weightless free or pay £3 in the UK to see Sharkarama.
SteamVR can be used with various headsets including its own (Valve Index) and Oculus Rift. ImmersiX is also compatible with OpenXR, the open standard for APIs used when developing XR applications across a wide range of augmented-reality and VR devices. This opens the way to PresenZ content appearing on Windows Mixed Reality headsets and Meta Quest, among others.
Gianluca Meardi (he and Guido are brothers) reiterates that studios working with PresenZ can leverage the same production pipelines used with CG video, so can remaster cost-effectively. His big vision is that viewers can move from observing stories to inhabiting them.