Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1358125
a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 1 c g w 1 7 Do you approach an LBE experience differently from an at-home one? Yes, very, very differently. We consider location-based premium because we tend to use custom hardware, meaning it's po- tentially more powerful, and we can control the environment almost 100 percent. So if you were to go to a location and do The VOID experience, for example, we would have mapped that out very precisely. And you would get a much better immersive, higher-end experience because we control everything in that space – where walls are, where doors are, how we track you, what computer is being used for rendering, all those kinds of things. That technology isn't quite there yet, so there are many variables to in-home – the hardware, environment, lighting…. Until those technologies come around, the in- home experience, while still great and totally immersive, it is not quite what we consider to be premium, like going to a location. What's next? We've been working in VR for over five years now, and we have a fairly good handle on how to make a good experience there. We are really looking at augmented reality. We think AR is coming; there's a number of companies working on headsets, and we hope to see something in the next couple of years. The biggest break in AR is going to be a good headset. Right now, people are holding up their phone to do an experi- ence. It's fine for mapping and heads-up display-type stuff, but it's not great for an immersive experience. We are still really interested in loca- tion-based – people going to places for the experience. You don't need a big group, but you could go somewhere and see content, or the adventures could be staged across the city. Going somewhere makes the experi- ence more unique for the person. For that to happen, now we're talking about low-latency streaming and edge technologies for render- ing. The big word everybody always uses is '5G,' but we're talking about high-bandwidth, low-latency transmission. We think that's another big linchpin in all of this. For the work stream we call 'home and daily lives' to work well – to be compelling and immersive – especially for augmented reality, we need to understand a person's environment and be able to change the content to match that environment. Ob- ject recognizers, mapping indoor spaces – those are things people have started doing, but no one has shown a massively compelling version of it yet. But I do think it's coming, and that is another technology we really need – to be able to look at an environment, segment it, and understand each object so we can mesh our content to it. What are the goals for the next five years? As I said, AR is a big thing for us. Also, in those four work streams is something we call multi-layered experiences or singular- story worlds. We are interested in creating a unified story world that has different entry points from a number of different platforms. So, we could have a Star Wars story world going on, and somebody at home in a VR headset is interacting with that story world in a certain way. Then there might be some- one on the street in AR interacting with that same story world, but because they're in AR, that needs to be different than the person at home in VR. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of CGW. Images above are from the LBE Avengers: Damage Control. Some projects are experimental, others commercial. ILMxLAB Projects Commercial (starting with most recent) Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge Platform: Oculus Quest (at-home experience) Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series Platform: Oculus Quest + Ri, PlayStation VR (at-home experience) Vader Immortal – Lightsaber Dojo: A Star Wars VR Experience Platform: Location-based arcade-style experience Avengers: Damage Control Platform: Location-based entertainment Ralph Breaks VR Platform: Location-based entertainment Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire Platform: Location-based entertainment CARNE y ARENA Platform: Location-based entertainment (Oscar-winning project directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu) Experiments (starting with most recent) Sith Jet Trooper Experience Platform: Location-based interactive experience utilizing real-time performance Star Wars: Project Porg Platform: Magic Leap headset LiveCGX London Fashion Week project Platform: Real-time, mocap-driven augmented fashion presentation at London Fashion Week Trials on Tatooine: A Star Wars VR Experiment Platform: Steam VR Holo-Cinema Platform: Immersive installation And numerous other experimental projects pushing the boundaries of technological and narrative innovation