A partnership between Studio Lightship and Imverse.
Those who have participated in the escape room phenomenon of the past several years, no doubt understand the challenge and excitement, sometimes panic, of being trapped in a locked room racing against the clock. How many of us have wished we possessed a MacGyver-like knack for escaping these traps? Better still, what if there were somehow a way to have the actual MacGyver right there with us?
Until very recently, what may have seemed like a far-fetched premise from an 80’s sci-fi movie, has now become a very real collaboration between visionary film director Brett Leonard (“The Lawnmower Man”, “Virtuosity”) and the creator of the “MacGyver” franchise, Lee David Zlotoff. Together with Imverse – who are pioneering virtual reality with their multiplayer real-time volumetric capture and embodiment technology – they will endeavor to transport fans and friends into a deeply immersive, live-action MacGyver-based VR escape room adventure for Location Based Entertainment.
Housed in physical venues similar to traditional escape rooms, participants will be volumetrically filmed and displayed in real time as digital holograms inside VR, and be able to see photoreal representations of themselves and others, right down to their own outfits. As they freely explore and interact with virtual objects and each other, participants will work separately and together to solve their way out, essentially becoming protagonists of their own unique stories, enjoying real body-presence in VR like never before.
And let’s not forget the main attraction. While the story details and mechanism of play are still in the development phase, the creators have indicated the character of MacGyver will feature heavily in each storyline, making appearances throughout, and always with the wry wit and novel gadgetry that are hallmarks of the globally-recognized franchise, which now spans over three decades in 70 world markets.
“I’m thrilled to be expanding the scope and vision of my creation to virtual reality,” says Zlotoff. “While I had been previously approached about both VR and escape room concepts, I wanted something that was so bleeding-edge, it would reinvent the character and people’s opinions of what’s possible in out-of-home entertainment.”
The venture – albeit a no-brainer from both the ‘MacGyver’ and escape room standpoints – is designed to be a foil for the current Location Based VR Entertainment (LBE) landscape, whereby room-scale environments are often limited in scope, with graphics more akin to video games than real life, and offer absolutely no visual character representation of one’s real self. The creative elements are being driven by Zlotoff and Leonard, through his Studio Lightship production shingle, along with film and veteran VR producer, Mark Rickard; while the technology elements are guided by Imverse, who are arguably the foremost experts in real-time volumetric capture/rendering, as part of their recent expansion to LBE.
“In existing LBE content, you never get to see your real self or your friends inside the virtual space,” notes Imverse CEO & co-founder, Javier Bello Ruiz. “At best, you get a computer-generated avatar — but it isn’t really you. With our real-time volumetric capture system called LiveStage, participants get to see their actual selves and walk around in mixed reality, creating a deeply social and collaborative experience. LiveStage also lets participants interact naturally, using their holographic bodies and hands, without the use of any controller. They can effectively touch virtual or real objects in the room.”
As for the Director of the experience, Leonard, who is widely regarded as both a trailblazer and tastemaker for immersive entertainment, this is not just another day at the office. After a recent symposium in Los Angeles on the state of the location based immersive landscape, he intimated: “The ‘MacGyver’ experience we’re developing is immersive on a level we haven’t seen before. Interactions with the environment and other participants are organic, natural. It’s all the best things about escape rooms and VR on steroids, and will leave guests in awe once they realize they’ve been physically and personally transported to this incredible world.”
We will have to wait until 2020 before the finished experience can be debuted to the public, in multiple locations around the world (updates at creators.imverse.com/macgyver). But those interested in experiencing the Imverse entertainment technology in action right away can do it at their demo exhibition space in Los Angeles, upon meeting. Imverse is also welcoming investors for their upcoming Series A financing round.
IMVERSE — 3D graphics company developing entertainment technology for XR content creation in Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality and Location Based Entertainment (LBE). Thanks to its proprietary voxel engine, Imverse is developing real-time volumetric capture systems, as well as a global distribution platform for the future of entertainment, bridging games and movies. Grounded in human-computer interaction, Imverse is a spin-off from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience (LNCO), lead by visionary researcher Olafe Blanke at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.
LiveStage is Imverse’s flagship product. It is a proprietary real-time volumetric capture and rendering system, enabling studios and media companies to create interactive mixed reality content in which the holograms of users are generated live. Beyond avatars, LiveStage is the only embodiment system that allows the creation of immersive, photorealistic games and experiences for Location Based VR Entertainment where the participants are fully digitized. They see their self 3D capture inside the virtual world and can interact with each other and the environment using their own holographic body. No controllers nor sensors needed.
STUDIO LIGHTSHIP — A new multi-disciplinary technology and content company, uniquely focused on Virtual Experience (VX) — collectively, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality. Pioneering the Process-IP that make possible its “Virtual StoryWorlds” (immersive cinematic narrative worlds that users can navigate, explore, socialize, game, shop in, and ultimately, co-create), Lightship is helping to define the Virtual Reality medium over the next decade and beyond. In addition to a slate of original VX-oriented content designed to set the bar for narrative VR, Lightship is developing StoryWorlds for various brands, clients and disciplines, including narrative IP creators, music festivals and artists, environmental movements, new transportation systems, and medical visualization/research initiatives.
Brett Leonard is an award-winning Filmmaker/Futurist with over 25 years of Hollywood experience as a pioneer in both the development and use of new media technologies. He is widely recognized as a top thought-leader in VR since introducing the concept and term ‘virtual reality’ to popular culture in the seminal hit film “The Lawnmower Man”. In developing the concept of the ‘FragFilm,’ Leonard won the PGA’s 2010 Digital 25 Award (with other recipients including James Cameron, Ridley Scott, and Mark Zuckerberg). Most recently, Mr. Leonard is in post-production on “Hollywood Rooftop” — a first-of-its-kind immersive concept, concurrently crafted as both a 2D feature-film and ten-part VR Series — and has just wrapped principal photography on the family feature, “Triumph”, starring Terrence Howard and R.J. Mitte. He also has several high-concept immersive initiatives underway through his company, Studio Lightship.
Glossary
Mixed Reality (MR) is the simultaneous blend of the real and the virtual, such as integrating real people into virtual environments.
Holograms describe the idea of “whole” and “image”. It has been used for different technologies as much as in general cinematic pop culture, and usually refers to the general concept of real humans displayed in 3D.
Volumetric capture is a technique that consists of filming people and dynamic scenes as 3D volumes. Volumetric capture and volumetric video are particularly challenging in real time and multiplayer settings.
Voxels, or volumetric rendering, is a graphics method that differs from polygonal rendering and can be described as tiny cubes that behave like atoms with real world physics properties. Voxels outperform polygons when it comes to real-time 3D capture. close-ups rendering, as well as simulation-based effects.
Embodiment is a concept related to the idea of giving a body to something and is an important element in cognitive neuroscience and human-machine interfaces in the case of presence in virtual reality as commercial VR devices do not integrate the body of the user.
Location Based Entertainment (LBE) is sometimes referred to as “out of home entertainment” and encompass entertainment venues such as Theme Parks, Arcades, Escape Rooms, Live Events, Movie Theaters, Shopping Centers, and more. Location based VR refers to the same venues having mostly VR technology.
Escape Rooms are real-life entertainment experiences where participants are locked in a real space, often designed with a theme and a story told through the environment. The goal is to escape the room though puzzle solving and intellectual gameplay.
Live-action is a genre/format of visual content in opposition to animation and 3D modeling, where the subjects are photographed through capture technology.
