Virtual Reality for Artists and Scumbags

I have found Virtual Reality to be incredibly useful as an artist, as it allows you to conceive of new concepts and fantasies very quickly without having to invest in space and material.

It can be used as a tool to create content that can then be built physically into the world around us, or to share a single experience around the world. It is flexible, and the more you work with the tools the more apparent this becomes.

In Unity you have the option of creating an animated and interactive space that your viewer/s can move through. You start by creating a very basic terrain that you can then fill in with your own content. This basic scene below is created from the following game objects: several spheres, terrain, and a cylinder. These objects can now be projected on with video or covered with images. This is essentially the skeleton of your world. From here it is a matter of simply creating content and finding or writing some simple scripts to add movement and interaction.

360 Cameras

VR tools are getting easier to come by and extremely easy to use. It is helpful to start with a 360 camera to experiment with space and get a sense of what it is to build for an immersive experience.

360 Video & Unity

Set Building

Shooting 360 presents different challenges, primarily because everything is in your shot. You have little leeway visually to set up lights and other equipment. To solve that problem you may want to build an opaque backdrop that would allow you to light the scene but keep the background clear.

This was my process for building a backdrop set:

I brought all different types of transparent materials to my studio and tested the lighting of different fibers and plastics to see what material was opaque enough to light from outside but could still obstruct external lines.

I found that silk was the best material to light and get a touch of activity from the outer world, therefore I built a triangular prototype tent for filming. Then I started working with lighting from the outside to see what effects I could get. I put the camera inside and started experimenting with ambiance.

The end effect can be seen here in this video. This is a 360 video, so you can click and grab the screen to shift perspective. You can also watch it in a Google Cardboard/Daydream/Samsung gear headset.

Site Specific Sets

While it is nice to have a controlled studio environment to shoot in, you can sometimes lose the feeling of being in an endless space. Within larger spaces — large industrial spaces or open fields, for example — it works well to block visual information with lighting by only illuminating what you want in the shot.

Another dynamic effect is illuminating see-through objects like this plastic grate above. Atmospherics can block out the surrounding equipment and still capture the feeling of a large space. In general, enshrouding the camera and creating movement from outside an obstruction can lead to a dreamy abstract effect without the feeling of a claustrophobic, limited view.

Sound is the most important aspect of building any environment so I will write an entire post on that in the future.

Hopefully that was a quick taster for you and you have a sense of what you can do. Feel free to post your processes or links to what you have made in the comments.

Wishing you the best!

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