Making VR with zero VR specific tools

Creating a 360 experience with a smartphone and editing software

Photosphere created with Google Street View at the top of Telica Volcano in Nicaragua

I recently challenged myself to make a 360 experience with only the tools at my disposal: a smartphone, a computer, no coding skills, and a ton of determination. I wanted to see how available VR creation is to those without tools and expertise.

After playing with really cool tools and putting together great immersive VR projects with teams of immensely talented people, I wanted to scale things back and set out to create basic 360 experiments with as little tech as possible. Even though there are a lot of new inexpensive 360 cameras on the market that don’t require stitching skills or softwares, they are not always accessible to the majority. And sometimes, you dont want to drop a few hundreds dollars just to play with a new medium.

Below, is a solution I found.

Benefits

Cheap and simple techniques of VR creation can be good for new creators who are trying to figure out what makes for a good VR story before investing in relatively expensive hardware and software. It can also serve to put together a quick prototype useful for finding funds or people to help push the project further. And if you have enough time and patience, it can be used for more than just sketching out your idea. More importantly, it opens the medium up to persons who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it.

Drawbacks

It can be a time consuming process and, at least in the way I have done it, limiting. There was also some serious troubleshooting at every production stage (some readers may not see this as a drawback).

Inside Google Street View app

The experience

There are a few apps available to make 360 videos or photos and after playing with Splash and Street View, I decided to concentrate on exploring the potential of the latter. Street View lets you make photospheres of locations and pin them on Google maps. I wanted to see what more I could do with the app.

Although some VR enthusiasts do not consider 360 photos or video to be virtual reality, I believe there is still a lot of room for creating interesting experiences.

Initially, I set out to make a 360 photo stop motion. A quick test proved it could be done.

A stop motion test in the backyard

But there were some issues.

First, to hand hold a smartphone as you snap the different images of the photosphere does not yield perfect stitching results.

A not so perfect photosphere of the landscape at the bottom of Cerro Negro Volcano, Nicaragua

To get perfect results, the phone must always be in at the same height while also having a steady up/down tilt motion and 360 rotation.

To solve this issue, @helio.teles and I build this simple and inexpensive tripod mount based on the model provided by Markus Haselböck. This let us rapidly shoot mostly perfect 360 images.

It works better than it looks.

Tripod mount prototype keeping the smartphone in place while shooting the photosphere

Our first test in the wild was during a hike up Telica Volcano in Nicaragua. The 22km trail through boiling mud pits and up the steep volcano offered us beautiful imagery. I thought it a fitting subject for the experiment.

The photosphere results were quite fantastique and only required a little Photoshop to fix a small black hole present at the top of the images and to remove weird personless shadows.

I was not able to capture sufficient images to make an interesting stop motion and decided instead to add animation to the vapour of the mud pits and the smoke of the volcano to recreate the experience of being there.

Using the tripod mount, I was able to make a perfectly stitched photosphere that only required some colour correction before it could be used in the the 360 experience.

Sound

Because I was shooting photos, sound was not being recorded with the image. If I wanted to create more of a video feel, I needed good sound. To overcome the silence, I collected natural sounds and I mixed them in with others from a foley library to bring life to the static images, and finished it off with Hélio’s experience of the hike as the narrative.

The Results

Using only a smartphone, a tripod and some editing software, I created a 360 experience of a hike to the crater of Telica volcano in Nicaragua. The goal was to see how simple or hard it would be to create a 360 VR experience with no VR specific tools.

Overall I feel this was a pretty cool experience which gave some nice results.

It is far from perfect but perfection was not the goal. Playing, learning, exploring options in 360 was.

As a video journalist, I see potential newsroom application for smartphone 360 photos as well as their variations. As a creator, it is exciting to know I do not need much to sketch out an idea for a VR story.

Although I used some editing softwares to put everything together, I am sure it could all be done with smartphone apps (I might investigate that option next…). As the barrier to entry is lowered for consuming VR, I feel it is very important for cheap and accessible ways of making VR to be put forth as to introduce a greater diversity of persons and their stories to the medium.

Let me know if you have an tricks or suggestions for cheap and easy VR/360!