Digital Realities: Project 2
Shannon Lin and Shelly Zhang
Final Video: https://tinyurl.com/360travelVid
Treatment Document: https://tinyurl.com/DigitalRealitiesTreatment
Idea: We really want to interrogate the 360 video creation process, and a perfect spontaneous environment to do so within was while traveling– we are squarely outside of a CMU comfort zone. To emphasize language, culture, and identity however, we need an actual commentary about the travel itself/aspects of our travels. And to give the user more info and address them directly instead of making them a voyeur, we want to give the audience both the visuals and our personal commentary. In our composite, we position ourselves eye level with the camera while we discuss our travels, pointing at specific things: “[_] behind you is [_], I learned [_] about [_]!” Our final deliverable is the composited 360 video of irl guided commentary over a montage of our 360 captures.
Rationale: For both of us, travel and independence is something that we’re still getting adjusted to. Most of our parents did not have that kind of luxury growing up, and in turn our lives have been through quite a bit of guidance before entering CMU. With the new arrival of fall break, we had the opportunity to take the week off and explore new environments entirely, and in this skit we aimed to commentate and analyze those experiences that happened tangentially across different states.
In this second project, we both wanted to explore more of the immersive, VR world, and delve away form the singular layer of space we created in our first projects individually.
We decided that to take it a step further, we’d record ourselves in 360 space, and layer it onto the 360 worlds we had created/filmed for ourselves on our trip, and see if it was possible to implement a VR space within another space. We each borrowed a 360 camera for our individual fall break trips, and recorded our experiences of traveling through different cities in the same time span.
Throughout this period, we were mindful of the information we learned throughout the trip, the angles and perspectives of the 360 camera, and the spaces we were in compared to spaces we were familiar with.
Shannon: I’ve personally never used a 360 camera before, so this experience was already quite new to me. To create a 360 space for VR all my myself without an existing asset like Tilt brush — this was something I have never done before, and I was really excited to work on it for the first time
After collecting our series of vacation videos, we built a treatment document and recorded ourselves in an empty room.
Challenges:
- 360 videos were difficult to work with due to proprietary systems and a lack of reliability. Storage space was small, so videos had to be cut short. Importing also was not always consistent
- Editing is straightforward but requires a lot of firepower that Shelly’s laptop struggled with
- 360 cameras are still not quite universal enough: often times the general public felt uncomfortable and would ask to turn the camera off
Reflection:
While 360 video is a super fun and exciting medium to work with, we found that it was a bit finicky work with, as the recordings needed to be converted into an HDRI-looking format for .mp4. The real pain points that we found really hindered our process was the unreliability of getting footage. It’s understandable given the size of the files, but often the process of recording could be pretty hit or miss. For both of us, running into “sd card too slow” or other recording time limits was a real limiter and for Shannon, sometimes the footage just wouldn’t show up onto her computer. We got it to all work out in the end though!
Overall, we found that it was a really cool and innovative way to record the places we went, mores so than just ordinary pictures. It was also fun to show to friends and play with, and technically we both gained a lot of experience in understanding the 360 → VR pipeline through video taking to post-editing processes.
