Innerspace VR is made up of a group of people who met in art school, and have been experimenting with VR since 2011. Jason Ochoa was at SVVRCon, and shared a little bit about what types of cinematic VR experiences they’re creating.
Innerspace VR was showing a trailer for the first episode of The Fifth Sleep, which is an interactive story within a story where man who is in a coma shows you his fantastical imaginal world. Jason says that it’s like a cross between Inception and Fantastic Voyage.
They’re planning on creating a series of episodes that have branching narratives, and they’re going to be gathering feedback as the story progresses in order to get more iterative feedback for their development process. They’re planning a total runtime of around 90 minutes, but with all of the branching narratives then it could be as much as three times that length.
Innerspace VR originally started developing with the Crytek CryEngine, but have since migrated over to using Unreal Engine 4. They were also originally fairly skeptical about developing for mobile due to their graphics requirements for doing interactive cinematic VR, but they’re planning on creating some pre-rendered sequences that are output as video files, but still perhaps have some interactive elements to them.
Innerspace VR has also been busy in creating a variety of different VR experiences. Beyond The Fifth Sleep, they’ve created a couple of Gear VR experiences including DMZ: Demilitarized Zone VR documentary & the Playhead game. They’re also creating a room-scale HTC Vive experience called Firebird where you perform as a ballerina in front of an audience. A couple of other VR experiences they’ve created include The Cave and The Forbidden City virtual tour.
Finally, Jason is looking forward to more immersive experiences that allow you to make decisions, but also has a high replay-ability factor that makes you want to experience everything that’s possible. He also sees a lot of potential of adding in a social component in going on different quests and accomplishing tasks with his friends.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.976] Jason Ochoa: My name's Jason, and I'm here with Interspace VR. And we are a software studio. We're doing CG movies for virtual reality.
[00:00:20.461] Kent Bye: Nice. And so let me talk a bit about what type of experiences are you creating then.
[00:00:24.927] Jason Ochoa: So today I'm showing a five-minute trailer of one of our movies called The Fifth Sleep. It's a story within a story. So you think of Inception meets The Fantastic Voyage. And you have to go into this man's mind and discover who he is. You realize he's in a coma and you have to decide if you either want to wake him up or not after he shows you his fantastical, beautiful world that he lives in.
[00:00:50.958] Kent Bye: And so what are the affordances of virtual reality that allow you to do things that you couldn't necessarily do in, say, a 2D film version of the same story?
[00:01:01.207] Jason Ochoa: Yeah, I mean, that's the magic of VR, right? So you feel like you're present, you feel like you can be a part of the story, like you're participating. And it's an entirely different language that you have to use and techniques. So it's sort of the evolution of cinema and video games. And this new language is only going to apply to VR. But it's just amazing. You know, we couldn't do that before.
[00:01:26.248] Kent Bye: How'd the story come about? Who wrote it? And where did it come from?
[00:01:29.340] Jason Ochoa: The story started in art school for Balthazar, our creative director, and he was working on, inspired, you know, by the Fantastic Voyage, and he called it Eidolon at first, and then it just evolved into what it is today, and then we hoped to do the first, you know, ever interactive film of about, you know, 90 minutes, and then cut it up in about six pieces, or six 10 to 15 minute episodes.
[00:01:57.207] Kent Bye: How is it interactive in terms of different branching or, you know, kind of just timing or what type of interactivity are you adding to this VR cinematic experience?
[00:02:06.936] Jason Ochoa: We're going to have two versions, right? So this is in the game engine and we're going to have the higher-end PC-based version. We'll be able to basically have higher levels of interaction. So yeah, you'll have branching of the story, make your own adventure kind of thing. You have triggers, so if you're distracted, you know, you turn around and there, the next sequence of events happen. And for mobile, you have something similar, so you can still have the branching, but it's more of an interface that you either left or right, or yes or no, and then you keep going with that branching of the story.
[00:02:39.274] Kent Bye: Yeah, so what are some of the challenges that you've run into in terms of doing this type of experience in VR?
[00:02:45.737] Jason Ochoa: Well first the technical challenges were great because there's a lot of limitations with mobile and nobody had really figured it out. We were building in Crytek and there wasn't really a way to get the equirectangular frame that you need to make it into a sphere. So there was just a lot of work that had to be done with the stitching to make it into that frame to make it into a 360 video. Now you don't have to do that. Now you'll save huge amounts of time because there's plugins that, you know, you can just get that straight out of the game engine. So that was some of the challenges. Of course, there's the challenge of the story, branching of the story and then developing all of that. So you have to be, take it one episode at a time and see how people react to that and then keep developing in that way. So you can't get too crazy too fast.
[00:03:34.505] Kent Bye: So is this 90 minutes, what it would take to kind of experience all the different branches? Or is that kind of a sit down and experience it from beginning to end in one specific path?
[00:03:45.148] Jason Ochoa: One specific path is the vision. But if you were to go back and explore the rest of it, it would be a lot more than that.
[00:03:52.570] Kent Bye: So how much content are we talking about here in terms of, like, if you were to experience every last permutation and iteration, how long would it take for you to go through this experience that you're planning out?
[00:04:02.742] Jason Ochoa: It's not set in stone. It's a work in progress. But it would probably be at least three times the straight line of 90 minutes.
[00:04:10.508] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting to think about how you design an experience so that it's a good experience on any one of these given paths that you take.
[00:04:19.402] Jason Ochoa: Exactly, yeah. So I was thinking about that and that's why one episode at a time. See the feedback, see what people are actually going down in paths and play with the story. So it's a huge undertaking, it's a very ambitious challenge but I think that it's exciting and it hasn't been done before and we're ready to do it.
[00:04:40.020] Kent Bye: And are you doing live action 360 degree video or is this created solely in the game engine and is all CG?
[00:04:47.074] Jason Ochoa: All CG. We think that why bound ourselves to reality when you can be in a world that you can never see in real life. And game engines are just the best way to make this happen with the fluidity that you have with it and the flexibility that they give you.
[00:05:04.871] Kent Bye: And can you tell me a bit about the backstory of Innerspace? Like, why did you call yourselves Innerspace?
[00:05:10.796] Jason Ochoa: It was inspired by Innerspace, the movie. The team has been working together in VR since 2011, and this is, you know, art school with the old 2000 clunky headsets, they're really expensive and bad, and the VR dedicated environments, like the Lovell Virtual, That was a time of a lot of experiments, you know, seeing what works, what doesn't work, trying to figure out not only how to tell a story where you're present and you're participating, but working with the limitations of that hardware, which at the time were a lot. And, you know, last year the team went to Korea and met with Oculus, and Oculus introduced us to Samsung. Samsung really liked what we were doing and they were excited to work with us and at the time we were doing stuff with the DK1 and we weren't really that excited about mobile just because, you know, we're doing 3D rendering, mobile just doesn't have the same processing power. You know, they gave us some of their prototypes that they had at that time and we realized it's like, whoa, this is actually pretty good and it's better than the DK1. And so after some time and some money, they convinced us to work on mobile. So it's been an exciting ride since then. Yeah.
[00:06:29.623] Kent Bye: And so I imagine that at some point, either you're still using Crytek or you decided to move off Crytek into either Unreal or Unity. And so did you stick with Crytek up to this point, or did you have to be forced to kind of move into something that is actually more integrated and works?
[00:06:43.612] Jason Ochoa: Moving off of Crytek. Yes. We're going into Unreal. It's a lot more fluid. There's plugins that make things easier. So we think Unreal is going to be, you know, you have full access to the code so you can create plugins and things like that. And that's what we need for VR. You know, we need to make it easier for a lot of other people, like creating that equirectangular, for example, frame that was just so painful for us and now it's so easy to do.
[00:07:10.795] Kent Bye: In a traditional film, you have storyboards that you're able to actually kind of like plan something out with what you can see in that frame. With the 360-degree video, how do you go about planning and sort of drawing these out? Do you just make a super long box with everything that's in it? Talk about that process of actually kind of taking these ideas from your brain and kind of doing a rough sketch before you actually start building it.
[00:07:35.520] Jason Ochoa: So it's very similar, you know, to a movie or to a video game, but when you're thinking about mobile, you're going to make a video, right? So it's 360 pre-render video, so you really have to think about the sequence of things and how you're going to play it out in the game engine. And so you do, you sketch out the storyboard, where it's going to go, where the frame is going to go, where it's going to look, and then you move along with that, and then you'll end up with a sequence of, you know, for example, the cave is about 4 minutes and 30 seconds. And that's what you, you know, import into, you know, After Effects or something like that, and you have transitions, effects, select the output that you need. For example, for the gear, right?
[00:08:12.345] Kent Bye: I see, so you're rendering out in 360 degree video in order for people to actually watch it then. Right. Great.
[00:08:18.450] Jason Ochoa: So what's next for you guys? Next for Innerspace. Alright, so we are building the next episode of The Fifth Sleep, which will be out when the Vive headset is going to be out, so holidays this season. We're working on the next episode of Playhead, which will also be out around that time. We have our title, DMZ, which is out in about a week or two. And that's the militarized zone between North and South Korea. And also, we have an experience that we're building for the Vive, specifically, that's codenamed Firebird. And this is a room-scale experience where you dance around with the ballerina, you realize you're on stage, and you have to perform for an audience. So Fantasia-style music, very exhilarating and fantastic.
[00:09:08.590] Kent Bye: I see, and the DMZ was part of the mobile VR game jam, is that correct? And maybe you could talk a bit about that experience.
[00:09:14.931] Jason Ochoa: Yeah, so we submitted that for Game Jam. It's going to be interactive, so it's limited amounts of interactivity, but still you get to see the map, which is built in Unity, and you get to decide where you want to go in the DMZ. And that'll trigger a video of a sequence of events that happened to the soldier who went inside. And once you go through that sequence, then it'll open up the next set of events that could happen if you choose that. It's narrative, so it's the story of the soldier going into the DMZ and you feel the tension that he might blow up in any second. And it was submitted for the, you know, narrative for the Oculus Game Jam.
[00:09:52.637] Kent Bye: Yeah. So what type of things do you want to experience in VR then?
[00:09:56.666] Jason Ochoa: I want to experience, obviously, the Fifth Sleep, you know, something that is very immersive, that you can make decisions along the way, that you want to feel like you want to play several times, maybe because you want to look somewhere else or you want to make a different decision. I want more of that out. I want people to start making movies, you know, it's accessible now. We all have these off-the-shelf software that you can just go to Unreal and start building your stuff and then export it make it into a video and there it is you know for all these people so The more creative people get in it the better and I'm excited for that.
[00:10:32.135] Kent Bye: Yeah And so what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:10:39.246] Jason Ochoa: The ultimate. Well, that's hard to say, but you already see all the applications in the medical, people curing phobias. I'd be excited to experience a sort of cinematic experience where, say you go into a room and there's other 10 people in it, and you all have your headsets and you can see where each other is in the room. you know, here comes the dragon and you all have to slay the dragon and kill it together and have experiences like that together, social experiences that you can go to the movie theater and pay for and be there, you know, for maybe an hour or something like that. I think that would be really exciting. That's as far as entertainment. And I mean, as far as other stuff, it's going to be wild and it's probably going to go other ways that we haven't imagined. So we'll see. Yeah, it's exciting.
[00:11:30.170] Kent Bye: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. And thank you for listening! If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
