I was too busy watching the technical details that I only picked up a bit of the story. This is a recap, as I experienced it. 

A disabled man (not really disabled, my buddy Scott would not approve), grabs a metaphysical cube, dives into his own mind and manifests a world where a cleaned up and able-bodied version of himself has some fights and whispery conversations with an attractive woman. At points, we go into his headspace where we see things like large, animated glowing priests with large headdresses (maybe these are aliens) and at times there is a weird shadowy black figure standing in the window watching this creation. 

The main character is given a gift of this cube by the weird shadowy black figure but then is told that he is the real gift because he can manifest reality with his mind. Then, it ends with him sharing his vision with the woman, we watch through the window of his disabled self’s room while there is a nice, romantic garden setting and the able-bodied version of the man embraces the woman.

This is the pilot episode of a series? But I think there is only one episode created so far. 

The people are filmed, not animated, and that does help the story (at least for me). I enjoy watching people perform, but volumetric capture is not evolved enough yet. I was very distracted by the many glitches on the actor’s faces (and bodies); oftentimes half of their nose or more will disappear, their hair turns into cubes, their clothes form odd shapes, their bodies always seem to be shape shifting. I watched this episode on one of the highest quality consumer headsets, the Valve Index, and I watched it on a super powerful computer that we built specifically to handle editing 3D video and still the quality is just terrible. I would hate to see what it looks like on a Quest 2 or a Rift.

Here is a trailer so you can see part of what I mean – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPsCIbETmOs 

I didn’t understand the story. To be fair, it is a neat idea to have a person in VR manifest worlds. But the story is not successful.

I don’t enjoy that we need to grab objects to further the story (it won’t advance until you do), but this is a somewhat clever way to force you to prepare for an edit. If they just cut to a new scene while you are in the 360 degree, 3D world, you would get nauseous. So, it was necessary, but clunky.

I’m not a big fan of this project but I like seeing things like this because it helps me understand the limitations of some of the new, cutting edge technologies that companies are attempting to create narratives with. It’s not working and that helps me to figure out what will work.

Technical Specs

360 degrees – you can look all around you

6 degrees of freedom – you can move all around

3D – everything has dimension

Animated environments

Volumetric Capture for the actors

You control the editing by grabbing a metaphysical object like a glowing sphere or the cube, which helps with all the transitions.