Tools & Techniques for AR/VR Media
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Film techniques were tweaked for decades after the dawn of cinema.
Today’s film fundamentals weren’t always obvious: scenes, cuts, angles, montage, audio, lenses, edits, dialogue, special effects, subtitles, etc.
Everything had to be invented.
Techniques
AR/VR media is fledgling. Pioneers are generally treating the medium as “fancy” film and “fancy” video games. Most of the technical landscape remains unexplored.
Here’s a list of foreign territories for the coming decades:
- AR/VR “split screen”
- change relative size compared to surroundings (shrink/grow) (e.g. distance between eyes)
- 3D scene transitions
- allow multiple people to view the same movie synchronized from multiple views (e.g. the movie “plays” on a tabletop)
- head-track vs. room-track
- toying with eye dominance
- 3D rotation around observer
- change FOV
- 360-degree storytelling
- “shaky” cam
- flatten or exaggerate or invert depth (in different areas of view)
- display different content in each eye
- non-flat AR/VR subtitles/text
Editing Tools
New ship technology and magnetic compasses sparked Europe’s Age of Discovery.
AR/VR cannot be explored until artists can navigate the new landscape.
AR/VR editing suites need new features:
- foreground/background separation for “transparency” modes
- editors for AR/VR devices; seamless editing/playback on a single device
- head-track vs. room-track params for 3D films
- easy spatial transforms for 3D environments
- catalogue of 3D scene transitions
- FOV automator
- easy cropping/recentering
- 3D video stabilization
- depth editing
- per-eye editing and “rasterization”
- AR/VR subtitle generators