Review: MIYUBI on the Oculus Rift — Reviewed without Spoilers
Article written by Micah Blumberg, VRMA Virtual Reality Media
Today I watched a new VR film inside the Oculus Rift called Miyubi
Miyubi is a likable robot, and the film takes place from the robots point of view. It’s a 360 film inside a game engine with interactive 3D graphics that move with your head. At one point in the film you can see your reflection, because you are Miyubi, and as your real head moves the onscreen reflection of the robot moves as well. There are some other interactive elements to “discover” as well, but I won’t say anymore about what those are because as I said no spoilers.
In this day and age, when volumetric video is possible, 360 video is no longer acceptable. I have tried Volumetric Video with HypeVR, with an Otoy demo filmed on Facebooks new 360 cameras, with a Playstation VR demo, and with 8i. Volumetric Video means that you can move your body inside a movie, it means having access to roomscale position tracking inside a movie, it means the video has been converted to a 3D geometry of some kind, like pointcloud, this is possible because computers can learn the geometry of a space, either with a photogrammetry technique called videogrammetry that creates a 3D mesh for each frame of the video, or with a depthmap, from a depth sensor, or a point cloud, or a lightfield and this kind of video in VR is what we should all be demanding since the technology is out there now for filmmakers to use. So I am going to give the film one thumbs down for not being a volumetric video, and because when I tried to move around the world moved with me, which creates motion sickness, with volumetric video the world stays fixed so you can move more freely and experience a video with more comfort inside a VR headset.
The next problem was the content itself, in one seen the “dad” character mentions giving his wife a vibrator as a Christmas present, and he slaps his wife the “mom” character on her behind. This is in front of the child actors who were also in the scene. It just made me uncomfortable. So I am giving it another thumbs down for uncomfortable content.
I also felt that the transition scene aka the Robot’s boot up scene was overused. You don’t really need to say that the Robot’s battery died in order to transition to the next scene, it was clever the first three times but not the last 14 or so times (not really sure how many times but I was over it way before the movie was over)
This is also the day and age of single camera mono tracking, Occipital (makes the Structure IO Sensor) show-cased Single Camera Monotracking technology at AWE2017 and it’s nearly good as using an HTC Vive (I tried it) ARkit from Apple is also using single camera mono-tracking, so there is really no longer any excuse for the Gear VR to not have position tracking that is nearly as good as the HTC Vive from the inside out.
The Google Daydream all in one (That integrates Google’s Tango technology) from companies like HTC is going to feature not only inside out position tracking, but also depth sensors and stereo cameras for some really awesome AR capabilities, and if it’s not at least on par with ARkit and the Hololens with it’s tracking capabilities then Google either needs to license Occipitals technology or they to submit to a world in which Apple once again has the most popular product by far. Great inside out position tracking can involve using a combination of inertia tracking (MEMS sensors like the gyro and accelerometer) with the camera tracking that features two neural network programs one to find all the highly visible points in a room, and another to calculate the headsets position relative to those points. You can read about the new Magic Leap whitepaper here that describes this idea of Deep Slam in further detail.
If you want to learn how to make Volumetric Video here are a couple of Facebook Groups dedicated to the focusing on this topic.
Volumetric Video VR AR Professionals: Point Cloud, 3D Mesh, Videogrammetry
https://www.facebook.com/groups/volumetric/
LucidCam 3D 180 VR Point Clouds
https://www.facebook.com/groups/lucidcam/
You can discover and share more Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Facebook groups here in the Facebook Group Registry
The Facebook Group Registry: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math https://www.facebook.com/groups/groupregister/
Bottomline: The movie is not acceptable for all audiences, not only does the content cause mild discomfort, but also there is some mild discomfort from the way it was shot (in 360 instead in volumetric video) some folks might get motion sickness. Two thumbs down.
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