Mini Review: Samsung Pilot Season
I checked out, briefly, all 6 episodes in what could be called Season1 of Samsung’s VR Pilot. A commendable initiative by Samsung to promote cinematic VR films. I was particularly interested in this, as I’m currently working on a similar episodic anthology series, titled: Latent Reality.
My thoughts in brief:
- Bro Bots is the best, it’s got humor, and it’s got immersion (it’s stereoscopic 360). I suppose being an animated series, the creators have ultimate control of the technicalities involved in maintaining immersion.
- All other pieces except Voyages#4, sadly, were bereft of true “immersion” because the scale is wrong. They were all streaming as flat 360 video. Apple called it QTVR and this is what it is.
- In the main header picture used above, the coffee table when seen in a VR headset looks like a flat plank on the floor. The people come across as giants pasted onto the furniture which in turn is pasted onto the insides of the viewing sphere.
- I believe Samsung’s ” 360 Round” camera (a 17 cam rig) was used in some of the episodes. Why wasn’t it shot with stereoscopic depth?
Shelby Ross, executive producer at Sibling Rivalry Studio, that produced one of the episodes:”& Design,” said,
“We wanted to make it feel less like something you were watching and more like something you were experiencing.”
But, and only imo, it was not experiential because it was devoid of binocular cues. The experience felt like floating around huge statues. The artifacts, if they were captured to some semblance of their true scale, would have made for more real-immersion.
The “last breath” shown as a beautiful, kaleidoscopic puff of smoke, (at around 0:07 seconds in the video above) would have let viewers truly “experience” it, enveloping them if done right.
In the same video clip, the woman at 0:52 seconds, would have seemed natural and have more of an impact, coming across as a real person sitting in front of you – if the scale was right. We have to remember, in a VR headset, striving to maintain scale (relative or absolute) is paramount to tricking our brains and lending to ‘presence’
Maybe, the streams uploaded to Samsung’s VR player, or when streamed and not downloaded via the GearVR have overlooked the “3D” switch. I’m hoping this is the case, because otherwise, the budgets spent (and they look like sizable budgets) do not do justice to the immersion that cinematic Virtual Reality is capable of.
SideNotes:
From the purely technical limitations of today’s VR hardware, one artifact diminishes the immersion capability – OLED displays. You’ll notice this manifest as splotchy black bleed (smear) in dark scenes in the Samsung Pilot Season, when watching in the GearVR on an S7/s8/S9 phone.
Facebook/Oculus are soon to release the Oculus Go, which will have an LCD display, thereby virtually eliminating this horrid artifact, I think Samsung will need to come up with their own LCD based phone or competing VR headset.
I’d addressed this in a question to John Carmack via twitter, and he acknowledged that this shortcoming will be history.
Contrast is worse because it is an LCD, but you have more sub pixels and all the low end color issues are completely fixed. Good trade, IMO.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 4, 2018
Overall, I’m happy Samsung is promoting Cinematic VR, and hopefully I’ll be able to do justice to the medium via the upcoming VR anthology series I’m working on.
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