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Sketching In VR

Please join us for Sketching In VR

Where? The Motion Capture Studio

When? March 8th, 6pm to 9pm

Tickets? s3dcentre.eventbrite.ca

2017 is going to be year zero for VR and volumetric experiences. Make no mistake: this will change all digital life as we know it today. And it will change your work, no matter what your discipline. But sketching in VR is still hard. It shouldn’t be. This 3-hour workshop will introduce you to the basics of thinking in 3D, give you a brief overview of the current VR device landscape, and – most importantly – provide you with a process for rapidly testing your VR ideas using paper, a camera, and Mozilla’s Aframe library. We’ll provide the Cardboard headset. You’ll provide the laptop, smartphone (at least Android 6.0+, or an iPhone 5 or later), a willingness to write code and a beginners mind.

 

 

 

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Events news virtual reality

A talk by Andrew MacDonald, world-renowned 360 Director and Cinematographer

Please join us in the Motion Capture Studio (NB 285e) March 3rd 11:30-1 for a talk by Cream 360 Director and Cinematographer Andrew MacDonald.

Andrew will speak about his experiences in 360 production and his talk and presentation will focus on his experience in production and the future of the medium:

• Storyboarding in 360 (using Vray),
• Blocking in 360
• How to move the camera in 360
• Building custom camera rigs
• Nodal point 360 shooting
• Shooting 360 on remote locations
• Essentials tools such as the teredek sphere
• Plus ambisonic recording and finishing

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Events news S3D virtual reality

Introduction to VR/360 Filmmaking Workshop

REGISTER NOW with the link  https://mastering.samcart.com/products/mastering-360-2-day-filmmaking-workshop-emilly-carr-vancouver-january-28-29-2017/

Discount code: VANVR

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Virtual reality and 360 filmmaking is rapidly becoming a fundamental part of the TV, Film and Advertising Industries. Introduction to VR/360 Filmmaking is a comprehensive 2-day workshop that empowers students with the tools, knowledge and skills required to create their own live action immersive experiences. Throughout the course, the instructor will provide a clear and precise explanation of the 360˚ filmmaking process; from pre-production to distribution. The content of the course includes but is not limited to VR/360 history, terminology, theory, technology, scouting, casting, storyboarding, scriptwriting, camera selection, camera operation, camera & actor positioning, lighting, stitching, editing, mastering content for headsets and online. This workshop is designed to offer a technical, immersive, and hands on approach to learning this new medium. Certification is available upon completion.

Prerequisite: Basic understanding and experience with traditional video workflow is beneficial. Students should bring a smartphone to review 360˚material in the lectures.

DSC_1087-1-201x300About the Instructor:

Chris Bedyk is a distinguished Cinematographer, immersive content creator, speaker, developer of 360˚cameras and founder of Perspective Films, a VR live action production agency and laboratory. Since 2013, he has been creating daring immersive VR/360 experiences for brands that include Vancouver Canucks and Idealens VR headset. He is the creator of VR Wonders of the World, a customizable virtual reality series that transports you to extraordinary destinations around the world. He was a speaker at 2016 CVR, the world’s first VR consumer conference, Factual West 2016, and soon at the 2017 Victoria Film Festival. He is a member of IATSE 669 International Cinematographers Guild.

 

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Events news virtual reality

Predicting the Future of VR/AR at Launch Academy

Recently, I had the opportunity to be part of a panel discussion called ‘The Future of Augmented and Virtual Reality’. I was flattered to be asked by the organizer and my answer was of course ‘yes’. I thought of others who have tried to predict VR/AR’s future  (e.g. Ray Kurzweil, Ted Schilowitz) and wondered what I could add to the now deluge of words on the subject.

The event, held at the Launch Academy, was sold out with 60 people packing into a space that normally holds 45. Before the session started the moderator, Mack Flavelle, polled the crowd trying to get a sense who had turned up. These people were true devotees: a mix of investors, educators and those who have fledging VR businesses. He asks the raucous crowd for quiet. We panelists assume our perch on the bar stools provided (with vinyl seat covers that I kept sliding on!).

Mack, ever the thoughtful provocateur, poses many important questions. The panels that I have been on or seen recently are more academic in nature, so I try to conceive of answers that are thoughtful and pithy. The other panelists, informed colleagues Kayla Kinnunen, Wren Handman, and Eric Hine, stick handle adroitly through Mack’s questions giving short snappy answers.

Then…he asks “Ok panel what is the one thing that is going to kill VR? But please don’t include lack of content in your answer.”

But surely that is the problem with VR right now? We groan in unison as we search for answers. I take a stab at it “I think it’s going to be advertising. I mean if you start to put ads in a virtual space surely that will be the death of it.” And so it goes. An hour goes by and it seems like 5 minutes. We provide answers to a dizzying array of questions: When will VR become like you cell phone, you can’t leave home without it so you drive home and get it? My answers seem to strike a chord especially regarding VR/AR’s lack of borders: “We seem to get inquiries almost daily about our research internationally especially China”.

Before I know it the panel is over and people come up and provide praise and validation for our contributions. But if those of us who are the so-called experts were really honest with each other we would just say that we can’t predict the future of VR/AR. Of course we can make some best guesses based on things we know today. But everyday there are new technological innovations that disrupt what we knew yesterday and we are all asking ourselves the same question. How does it affect what I do and where is it all going?

Maybe we should consider changing our approach. Instead of trying to figure out where it is all going we could tell each other our aspirations for the technology. We can’t control technological change. But we can help shape its growth making it something useful for the future. I hope Launch Academy asks me again to be on a panel. And if they do I will make sure I have Velcro’ed my pants!

Alan Goldman, Adjunct Researcher and Industry Liaison S3D Centre of Excellence Emily Carr University of Art + Design

 

 

 

 

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collaboration Design Development Events immersive imaging innovation news Projects S3D stereoscopic student virtual reality

How to Build a Virtual World: Part III – Materials, Lights and Shadow Dec. 10th

The nature of textures, light and shadow will be explored.

 

The most potent of virtual world experiences is the striking effect of how light interacts with materials and casts shadows.

RSVP is required. Get tickets at: https://www.picatic.com/event14478716567523184

Mike Pan will cover how textures interact with light. i.e. specular maps and gloss functions, with the ultimate goal being cinematic realism, which is actually different from what our eyes can see. His presentation will include some definitions of basic concepts and processes of texturing a model and how they are applied.

Aaron Hilton will talk about the cinematic use of Light and Shadow to drive the VR narrative; the art of light and shadow. He will also cover how the lack of an avatar representing the user can be worked around. Light and contrast can be used to direct attention. Creating a gradient of dark to light to help orient someone to where they need to go next.

The presentations will be followed by a period for Q & A.

We will close the evening with prize draws for: EA Games, Video Copilot Optical Flares plugins for Adobe After Effects and we will also be giving away three $99.00 licenses for Allegorithmic’s Substance Bitmap2Material 3. Bitmap2Material is an incredibly powerful tool that helps you generate full, seamlessly tiling materials from any bitmap image. This now includes all PBR (Physically-Based Rendering) channels, based on the most accurate conversion algorithm out there. Check it out here:


Snacks will be provided by our wonderful caterer Heather Ferguson.

Many thanks to our sponsors: Conquer Mobile, G-Technology & Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

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collaboration Design Development Events immersive imaging innovation news S3D stereoscopic student virtual reality

How to Build a Virtual World: Part II – Creating 3D Assets, Nov 18th 2015

How to Build a Virtual World: Part II – Creating 3D Assets

Creating the assets for your 3D world, sourcing available 3D models, capturing the world with photogrammetry and depth cameras.

Wednesday November 18th 2015. 6:30 doors open Presentation 7:30-10pm

Register online at : https://www.picatic.com/How_To_Build_A_Virtual_World_Pt_II Cost: $15 (sorry, no walk in available)

Location: Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Motion Capture Studio, Room 285D, 1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver, BC, Canada

 

VanVR, VanCG Meetup, and S3D Centre at Emily Carr University presents: “How To Build A Virtual World”

NOTE: doors will open at 6:30 PM. Presentations will begin at 7:30 PM. SEATING IS LIMITED. No tickets will be sold at the door.

Collecting the parts for your 3D world. Sourcing available 3D models, creating your own, capturing the world with photogrammetry and depth cameras.

Mike Pan will share his expertise with Blender: overview of the workflow in Blender, accessing models online, importing them into Blender, optimizing the model, exporting it for the VR platform of your choice.

Partick Wirt from Corbel 3D will explain the process of creating models using photogrammetry.

Aaron Hilton of Conquer Mobile will discuss recent developments in 3D scanning technology and give us a demonstration of his Occipitals’ Structure Sensor used for on the fly object scanning.

Matthew McCauley founder of GeoSim will talk to us about their high end-to-end system for scanning and modeling entire cities in 3D. The models feature high spatial precision and visual fidelity, and are interactive and parametric. Proprietary street level data collection enables entirely new kinds of city analysis and visualization.

The presentations will be followed by a period for Q & A.

We will close the evening with prize draws for: EA Games, Video Copilot Optical Flares plugins.

Food will be provided by our wonderful caterer Heather Ferguson.

 

Supported and Sponsored by:

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collaboration Development Events immersive imaging innovation news Projects S3D stereoscopic student virtual reality

The Future of Reality: a talk by Dr. Ken Perlin of NYU Media Research Lab, Nov. 6th

You are invited to a special evening with Dr. Ken Perlin of NYU Media Research Lab.

When: Friday, November 6th Doors @ 5 pm, presentation 5:30 – 7:00pm

Admission: FREE (must register in advance, sorry but no walk ins)

Register: https://perlin2015vancouver.eventbrite.ca

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Ken Perlin
Professor & Researcher, NYU Media Research Lab

Ken PerlinKen Perlin, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, directs the NYU Games For Learning Institute, and is a participating faculty member in the NYU Media and Games Network (MAGNET). He was also founding director of the Media Research Laboratory and director of the NYU Center for Advanced Technology. His research interests include graphics, animation, augmented and mixed reality, user interfaces, science education and multimedia. He received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television, as well as the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the TrapCode award for achievement in computer graphics research, the NYC Mayor’s award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Perlin currently serves on the program committee of the AAAS. He was general chair of the UIST2010 conference, and has been a featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dr. Perlin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University, and a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard University. Before working at NYU he was Head of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates in New York, NY. Prior to that he was the System Architect for computer generated animation at Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Centre for Digital Media at GNWC, and has served on the Board of Directors of both the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH and the New York Software Industry Association.

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin

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collaboration Design Development Events high frame rate immersive imaging innovation news Projects S3D stereoscopic student virtual reality

How to Build a Virtual World: a 6-part series on VR content creation

Series to assist Vancouver-area businesses and individuals in the creation of virtual reality experiences, environments. Read more.

PART 1: The Business of VR begins this month: Is VR a bubble? We’ll ask key content producers, investors, and luminaries to give us the broad perspective.

Date: Thursday October 22 2015 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM.

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collaboration Design Development Events immersive imaging innovation news Projects S3D virtual reality

IN IT Virtual Reality Showcase featuring worlds: dancing between body place and time

S3D Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Wednesday, 19 August 2015 from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM (PDT)
Vancouver, BC
RSVP and Register online

In It is Virtual Reality showcase co-sponsored by Emily Carry University and Immersive Media and will be held in the University’s Concourse Gallery from the 19th to the 23rd of August at 1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island in Vancouver.  This week long showcase highlights the work of local and international artist practitioners who are working and creating in the virtual. The presentation is a conglomeration of works that act as a great introduction to the VR space. The showcase is co-located with ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), and coincides with several other VR events on Granville Island. This event is the defacto closing reception of ISEA so come and join us for refreshments and VR.

A reception will be held on Wednesday, August 19th from 5-9 pm. Cash bar. There will be a food trucks outside the venue.

Credits: S3D Research Team: Dr. Maria Lantin, Sean Arden, Alan Goldman, Denise Quesnel

Participants:

Randal Kleiser Productions & IM360

Defrost-

DEFROST takes place in the year 2045, when liquid nitrogen is now commonly used to freeze patients until remedies for their illnesses are developed. The film follows the experience of Joan Garrison as she wakes up from her frozen state after thirty years. She reunites with her family, but the reunion is bittersweet, as the passage of time has caused her loved ones to become strangers. The short was filmed in 360°, allowing audience members to witness the story directly from Joan’s perspective. The result is an intimate and immersive experience.

Felix and Paul:

Herders-

Herders is a cinematic virtual reality observational journey that bears witness to the lives of nomadic yak herders in Mongolia. First screened at 2015 Sundance Film Festival 2015 Hot Docs.

National Film Board:

A Way to Go –

Way to Go is a walk in the woods. An astonishing interactive experience, a restless panorama, a mixture of hand-made animation, 360˚ video capture, music and dreaming and code. Created by Vincent Morisset, Philippe Lambert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit & Caroline Robert (AATOAA). Produced by the NFB & France TV.

Cardboard Car Crash –

In a world of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, who determines the ethics algorithm to handle emergency situations? In this VR vignette, the user is slowed down to bullet-time, becoming the computer, and forced to confront difficult decisions where there is plenty of data, but no easy answer. Created by Vincent McCurley.

Moving Stories:

worlds –

The project worlds is a real-time networked augmented and virtual reality performance that explores the multiple and simultaneous experience of our collective and individual inner and outer, past and present, and physical and imaginary worlds. Bringing together 3 unique performance venues across 2 canadian cities, including the ECUAD lobby gallery the ECUAD IDS mocap studio in Vancouver and the CRIM motion capture studio in Montreal, worlds is a collaborative endeavor under the umbrella of the SSHRC funded movingstories research project and the CANARIE funded m+m: movement + meaning middleware software development initiative.  worlds is part of a live networked collaborative VR performance showcase and will take place during the opening reception, beginning at 5pm on Wednesday, August 19th 2015. worlds has been created in partnership with the S3D Research Centre at Emily Carr University and Pepper’s Ghost New Media Arts Collective.

Creators: Athomas Goldberg, Thecla Schiphorst, Maria Lantin and Tom Landry; Composer: Stefan Smulovitz; Performers: Yves Candeau, Brittany Gee, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, Shannon Cuykendall, Caroline Barrierre. We are grateful to the software and technical development work by Dhruv Adhia and Norm Jaffe (m+m; h+technologies) and Tom Landry (Research Director: CRIM) as well as Sean Arden and Rick Overington (ECUAD).

Dryft Digital:

Beer With a Bear –

Sit down for a picnic in sunny Montana with Brutus the grizzly bear and his human companion, Casey Anderson, in this quirky VR short film by San Diego/Calgary based production house Dryft Digital.

Cloudhead Games:

The Gallery: Six Elements –

The Gallery: Six Elements, is a rich narrative, fantasy exploration game inspired by dark 80’s

fantasy movies and the Myst video game series. Experience the HTC Vive VR hardware in our sandbox style demo. Cloudhead Games is a local virtual reality development company working in VR since late 2012, specializing in compelling interactive VR content.

Marten Berkman:

Hart to Heart –

Hart to Heart is the interactive installation component of a documentary project inspired by the conflict over land use in the Peel watershed in Canada’s Yukon. Disrupting our omnipresent two dimensional representation of wilderness, h2h challenges the duality between human nature and the rest of nature conditioned by our manufactured spaces. As we discover ourselves in this landscape along the Hart river, how does technology become a part of our ecology?

VRVid.io:

Vrtist –

Vrtist is a drawing app that allows the user to draw in the 3D space around them. A key goal of the project is simple, intuitive interaction. Virtual reality is a highly expressive and personal medium for storytelling & expression, and Vrtist is a small sample of its creative potential.

Dare:

Destination BC’s “The Wild Within” Virtual Reality Video

In December 2014, DBC launched The Wild Within VR Experience, using Oculus Rift technology, making it the first destination marketing organization in North America to use virtual reality to promote the destination.  The Wild Within VR Experience is an interactive, three-dimensional video that allows travellers to experience British Columbia in a truly immersive way, as if they were actually there.

Wavesine Solutions:

High quality virtual real estate and city visualization

This project has been in development for over a year now and early iterations were shown at a number of VanVR meetup events as well as many private showings at the Sawmill to Real Estate and VR enthusiasts alike.