360° Video: From Planning to Implementation

By Jennifer Galvan
jeg128@txstate.edu

Texas State University’s annual Mass Comm Week kicked off on Monday with 360° Virtual Reality storytelling.

The event focused on learning how to plan, strategize, design and implement a 360° story through a Virtual Reality (VR) storytelling

Brenda Urioste, advertising major at Texas State, attended the event to learn more about the subject.

“This panel was really important because they talked about how new this industry was and how there is a lot of opportunities to learn and grow from it,” said Urioste.

“So I thought that was really exciting,” said Urioste.

Among the panel were advertising professionals Ricky Holm, Danny Garcia, Neal Nellans, Nicholas Ross and Nicole Hamilton.

Immersive media, which are the overview of three most common spectrums, are Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and MR (Mixed Reality).

Neal Nellans, a VR architect at Mutual Mobile began explaining what each spectrum are and how they are used.

AR is a live direct or indirect view of the physical real-world environment by overlapping CG render such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data like the popular mobile game Pokemon Go.

VR, which is most common in video games, is a photographic world, which is displayed in a HMD (Head Matter Display) that uses your angels and sensors from your head to interact with 3D worlds.

MR, also known as 360° Video is a video camera substitute that replaces tracking units. It is essential in replacing the HDM with a video camera to allow viewers to watch someone in the virtual space. MR is similar to AR but it translates and manipulates in various ways similar to overlaying pictures that can be recorded.

For the future of VR, the panel agrees that no one knows where it is going to fit in.

Ricky Holm, CEO of Chocolate Milk & Donuts in Austin and VR & 360 Video said that one of the trickiest things in all creative media productions is to communicate creative ideas among individuals that are not in the same room.

“We are more interested in educating our clients and focusing on what the possibilities are in the technology and defining exactly what their goals are and taking it to the next level,” said Holm.

The panel agrees that no one knows where it is going to fit in the future because of how new and extremely experimental it is.

Although VR is a stepping-stone into the evolution of training consumers to interact with media in a whole new way.

To see more of the panel’s individual work go to: bit.ly/2eyNMPG