To celebrate Halloween we’ve written this short blog to provide insight into how Virtual Reality can create a more immersive experience.
In traditional horror when something jumps out at you, you are looking in just one direction: towards the TV. So the thrill and anticipation is restricted to when something is going to shock you. With VR, it’s not just when, but it’s where from!
Virtual Reality and pigeons?
Years ago when Happy Finish first started experimenting with VR we shot all kinds of crazy test films. One such test involved us taking one of our 360 cameras, placing it on the outside floor of our open-air car park in Shoreditch, and throwing muesli at it. Within seconds, dozens of pigeons descended and hungrily pecked away at it. When you wear a headset and watch that, you feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock's ‘The Birds’, with a bunch of crazed birds trying to peck your eyeballs out!
Actually, doing this test taught us a good technical shooting lesson! Objects which are too close to camera, and therefore in-front of the lens’ convergence points, disappear then reappear as they move closely from one lens in the rig to another; so with VR, things tend to work better when they are in the mid to background
Traversal or too much motion can make the user feel nauseous. It’s far better to lock or slowly move the camera and let the action take around you, rather than try to cut quickly and move frantically around it.
VR movement and sound
In terms of thrills, we’ve all seen studies where someone walks into an empty room and is asked to walk from one side to another. No problem! But… when they are asked to do exactly the same thing again, but this time wearing a VR headset with a vertiginous view, over a cliff for example, they cling onto the wall and won’t take a simple step forwards! I wouldn’t say this is an issue, because it actually can be used to intensify the thrill, but it could overwhelm if not treated correctly.
3D or spatialized sound can add an even deeper immersion to VR content. For example, we have used 3D sound in an Oculus Rift application so that when a hideous scream or a haunting whisper is heard emanating from a particular direction in the VR space, when our user turns to investigate, that sounds stays locked to the point where in reality it should be coming from. This is powerful as its makes the content even more believable and it’s also useful as we can utilise the sounds to draw the attention of our user to the points in the experience we want them to see.
Asda's VR halloween experience
Having been engaged by Google and Asda, we’ve just completed the production of a Virtual Reality Halloween experience for Asda, with a challenge to create a more child friendly spooky commercial to help promote the vast array of Asda products for Halloween. With over a million views on the Asda YouTube channel, this is proving a huge success. Directed by Danny Vaia and Dom Bunjevic at Punq, we’ve struck a fine balance between spooky and fun, which in VR can be challenging due to the added levels of immersion. Something that could be just a little spooky in a standard film can be exponentially more scary in VR, when you are fully immersed in the world we create. Using Google cardboard and hosted on YouTube 360, this is believed to be a media first for UK grocery as it uses shoppable TrueView product cards, allowing Asda to thoroughly keep track of how effective it is in increasing sales of key Halloween products.
Follow The Light
For Halloween last year, Happy Finish teamed up with Director Ryan Hopkinson, represented by White Lodge and sound engineers Father to create a 360 degree horror video for Oculus Rift, called Follow The Light. Viewers were taken through some deep, dark, scary corridors, with only a torch light to guide them. People jumped out of their skins when watching it, as can be seen here!
To learn more about what’s possible in virtual reality, contact us today!
