Tools & Techniques for AR/VR Media

Related AR/VR essays: Apple Will Win The AR/VR Wars, AR Demands Peripherals, Bananas Will Become Smartphones, Monomode and Multimode in Augmented Reality, Claim a Domain in the Wet Web, AR Interoperability Opportunities

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