8i Are the Company Helping Filmakers Put You Inside Movies

21st January 2016, Wired By Angela Watercutter

Look, you’re never going to get to drive the Fury Road with Max and Furiosa. You’re just not. It’s a bummer, but it’s true. However, if you want a mini taste of that post-apocalypse life and you happen to be at the Sundance Film Festival sometime in the next week, then you’re in luck: 8i’s virtual reality experience The Wasteland awaits.

The movie places viewers (wearing an HTC Vive VR headset) in a dystopian desert alongside a female warrior as a hacked-together dune buggy drives up. Because the Vive’s Lighthouse system tracks your movement, you can walk around the desert, approach the vehicle, even look at the weapons the warrior is carrying. But what the best part isn’t all the cool dystopia stuff—it’s how the wasteland was made.

If a VR filmmaker had wanted to make Wasteland the hard way, they would have had to render the entire desert setting, car included, using CG. Then they’d have to do motion-capture with their actors and take that mo-cap performance and paint a face and clothes onto each character. 8i’s technology, however, lets filmmakers capture entire performances with off-the-shelf cameras and then place them in pre-existing environments, creating a fully navigable 3-D VR movie that’s far more immersive than the 360-degree videos most have seen.

“What you’re seeing there is this integration, using our tools, of a human that’s recorded in real life, completely dressed and acting, a CG element (the car), and a photographic environment that was a real place,” says 8i CEO Linc Gasking. “It allows storytellers, like the storytellers at Sundance, to be able to finally for the first time be able to put realistic humans into a story for virtual reality.”

Wasteland is just one of four VR projects 8i is bringing to Sundance as part of their #100humans program. (There are other companies working on volumetric capture for VR, from Lytro to Uncorporeal, but 8i is the only one confirmed to be bringing multiple experiences to Sundance.) The others show a mother leaving a message for her young child, a Roman gladiator who’s a dead ringer for The Karate Kid’s Johnny, and a climber on a vertigo-inducing ledge in the Grand Canyon. They’re all very different from each other, but they’re also different from a lot of the other VR experiences at Sundance. They’re meant to show filmmakers what they can do with 8i’s tech, not necessarily show what a filmmaker has done.

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