Couple of things to announce regarding London Timescapes experimental short film.

Firstly, it will be premiered at the Beyond 3D festival this October in Karslruhe, Germany. Same place where Helsinki 3D film got its slice of fame two years ago. For this special occasion I'll be mastering a DCP package in the upcoming week.

Secondly, I got my paws on the Oculus Rift DK2 kit for a weekend. This resulted in a few experiments and a special VR(ish) version of the film. And it is available for download.

How exactly it is optimized for Oculus headset? It is obviously not a 360 degree experience. What you will get however is a native stereoscopic full view film, with composition and transition optimized for viewing inside a VR headset. Each shot was recomposed bearing in mind specificity of the VR hardware. I'd obviously loved to give some head tracking abilities, but literally have no idea how to implement this. Maybe special video viewing software would help? Or it has to be a full blown Unity based simulation?

Few things that I learned on my way:

• Having static shots even with things moving in the frame is not great. Having a shot slightly animated however gives a nice feeling. By animation I mean having it slowl pan or tilt. Too fast panning would also not look great since we're talking about 24fps of a conventional cinema. That's actually another important matter - HFR is kinda must for VR enabled videos.
• Animation of a shot slowly zooming in might look cheap on a normal screen, but actually feels great in VR headset. It sort of gives you feeling of immersing yourself into the scene. Or flying forward.
• All shots must be composed in a way that most important subject it put in a dead center of a frame. Things would be different if head tracking would be enabled.

Download link for London Timescapes VR experiment. View it with any video player while wearing your Oculus Rift. I think any other HMD will work too.

Don't forget to tweet me what you think.

Got myself a new white Pebble watch. After a week of use here are a few impressions. Not in particular order.

• Screen is nice. I’m a huge fan of Kindle, and also one of my first watches was classic electronic Casio. Pebble screen is great when you shine light on it, and is ok with built-in backlight. Screen is indeed always on.
• Pebble is quite usable in the dark room studio with safe lights on. Even a dim light is enough to read off the screen without activating backlight.
• Battery life in reality is 3-4 days. It depends quite a bit on usage and screen refreshing needs. Some watch faces contain special settings for optimising battery life by turning off bluetooth for the night and disabling incoming notifications. I think it’s possible to live on a single charge for a full week, but that would require a bit of tweaking and using watch faces with little animations. Each screen refresh counts.
• Can vibrate, but otherwise completely silent. No speaker.
• Also no touch screen. It seemed that many people expected Pebble screen to be touchable and were slightly disappointed to learn that it is proper old school buttons only experience.
• There are 4 buttons in total and a microphone. Latter is pretty much useless with iPhone, but suppose to shine with Android devices.
• Smartwatch with timer on your wrist is surprisingly useful when cooking food or developing film. Smartphone is much less so.
• It is second generation of Pebble watch, and it is fully open for third party developers. All first generation apps and watch faces are compatible. They are also black and white only.
• There are way too much cool watch faces for Pebble. Some cool apps too. All free.
• Yes, there is authentic Hypnotoad watch face
• And Fallout PipBoy watch face, with extra mode displaying radioactive clouds and outside temperature. Activated by shaking your wrist
• By default shaking your wrist will turn backlight on. It will also start Nyan Cat flight mode if that’s the watch face you’re using.
• It’s ok to change watch face multiple times a day.
• It can function without a phone, but its purpose is to be a companion device. It will forward all notifications from iPhone without any extra settings. It will also dismiss them on the phone once you dismiss them on the watch.
• Waterproof
• Contains activity tracker. You can have one app at a time having access to it and collecting data. It can also be a watch face - which is basically an app that displays time. Fallout PipBoy watch displays step counter as XP and gives you levels as you progress.
• You can have a virtual pet app. It can also be a watch face and activity tracker at the same time. Yes, I’m looking at you, FitCat.
• Not sure if there is limit for the amount of installed apps or watch faces. So far I’ve installed 15 watch faces and 8 extra apps.
• You will need phone for installing / managing content on the watch. Pebble Time app on iPhone is a bit sluggish when it comes to its own AppStore, but otherwise nice. All apps are free too.
• Pebble SDK is C language based, but there is also Pebble.js option.
• When holding both (large) Apple Watch and Pebble Time, latter feels lighter and smaller.
• Timeline mode is one of the basic features, and feels incredibly natural. It will suck all events from the phone for the 3 next days, as well as weather data and sunrise / sunset times.
• Someone mentioned that Pebble feels like Nintendo device - nice friendly appeal, animations, with low res graphics.
• There is Authenticator app for 2-factor generated passwords. With some trickery it’s possible to have same passwords generated on both phone Google Authenticator and watch app. Needless to say, it’s super useful.
• There is a watch face imitating my good old Casio electronic watch. And about 20 other classic Casios.

Last week was notable for an inaugural Virtual Reality London meetup. I was lucky enough to get a ticket.

Space - Mind Candy office in Shoreditch

Organizer - Rewind.co

Mind Candy was conveniently located on my bike route between home and office. Trickiest part was to get tickets - originally they released 50 of those, and I was way too late for that party. Then there was Tube strike day - and event got postponed for a week. 2 days before new date they released 50 more tickets, and hurray, I was in.

In addition to talks they made a small exhibition of everything VR. Headsets, rigs, simulations, software solutions. Couple of notable things were:

1. Red Bull Air Race simulation by Rewind. Real time render of you piloting an acrobatic plane. It was interesting to note that pure visual stimulus of you being in the airplane can generate authentic feeling with your vestibular system. It felt very much like gravity was shifting according to the movements of the plane.
2. Live broadcast of a 360 degree video from a rig into a VR headset. They’ve built a camera rig with 6 GoPro:s, which was filming surrounding area. Next there was a black box stitching HD video from all 6 cameras into a spherical video in real time. This was in turn fed into Oculus Rift DK2 headset. Resulting effect was astounding - since the rig was in close proximity, you’d had a relatively authentic out-of-body experience. Relatively - because there was a tiny bit of latency and resolution issues. The idea behind this is to get real time broadcast from events like concerts.

VR is situated at the interesting cross section of things like filmmaking, games, sound and web. Everyone feels like there is a huge potential in whatever your area is, but nobody have much clue above that. Once again there was mention of a quality content. VR itself will not make bad content awesome - quite the opposite. Since you are suppose to be immersed into the content, it is content’s responsibility to be attractive enough that users would want to be immersed.

Few trends are now become distinctive for VR applications:

• Interactive simulations. Basically, games, but with you strapped to a seat / space. You can look around, and it’ll be rendered in stereoscopic 3D.
• Actual games with you affecting the environment
• Films. 2D 360 degree (more often) or stereoscopic 3D (less often, more complicated). Can be very powerful with documentaries. 360 degree videos are now natively supported on YouTube.
• Web. Content is rendered with WebGL in stereoscopic 3D. Some examples available on Mozilla VR pages.

From all of the above mentioned trends WebVR might become the most popular one. It might not be a replica of Second Life or what VR was imagined to be in sci-fi films of past century, but it will find its shape.

Next London VR meetup is announced too - it is going to be on 10th of September at Madam Tussauds.

London Timescapes film is basically finished and looking for distribution.

What is it?

9 min long audio-visual experience around London and time. Filmed in native stereoscopic 3D in 4K resolution. Properly color graded, with original music composed by Dominik Piatek specially for this movie. In many ways it is my personal exploration of this big city, places, people and rhythms. I think it’s stereoscopic aspect will provide viewers with unique opportunity to immerse into the experience and feel the beat of this place.

How is it going to be released?

I’m currently looking for opportunities to screen it in proper stereoscopic 3D. Otherwise I think it’ll be released soon for free in full HD 2D on Vimeo, with options to license it in 4K and stereoscopic formats.

Another idea is to create a virtual reality experience. There is enough resolution to allow viewer certain degree of freedom to look around. It’s not going to be 360 spherical experience, but combined with native stereoscopic it’s still should be enough to give you proper sense of presence. I need to find an Oculus Rift for some tests. Or just throw test renders at the VR community.

Future plans

Timelapsing is one of my passions, so the plan is to upgrade my stereoscopic rig in a next month or so. I’m thinking about Canon 750D:s - it’s capable of 22Mpx native resolution, which will allow me to capture proper 6K footage in RAW 12bit. They are also quite good at night nowadays. I think next year will be about VR, and so the next logical step would be to get one of the HMD:s and start cracking on VR experiences - something that will likely combine games and movies in a very near future.

Trailer

Trailer is still available for viewing on Vimeo.

Weekly recap on important things.

####Podcast

Not only we recorded a new episode of Radio Badger with Roisi, Viktor and Robbie, but also previous episode was finished and released all over the Internet. In August it'll be turning one year, and Roisi had an idea of having live broadcast on that day in front of the audience. Sounds like fun.

Blog on the episode 17 with shownotes and links is here.

####Photography

Did a bike trip on Monday to the West End Cameras shop in Euston. Now I have a stock of film developer, fixer, stop bath and photo flo solution from Kodak. It takes 50 min to get on bike from Euston back to Bethnal Green, if you have no idea where you're going. Got a bit lost, and then rode along the channel pretty much all the way to Haggerston.

This bunch of chems allowed me to successfully process 2 rolls of 35mm film - and with negatives in hand I got a session at the local darkroom for printing. Yesterday me and Stanisla spent 4 hours at Four Corners Film studio doing prints, and seems like both of us enjoyed it big time. I think we managed to do about 40-50 prints, all of them where left to dry in the studio until Monday. Expect some scans soon.

Finished a batch of stereoscopic pictures from my trip to California. If you have necessary hardware - like red-cyan 3D glasses or a 3DTV - have a look.

####Web dev

Got pretty excited about PostCSS this week. It's an elegant solution to skip CSS pre-processing nonsense and simply post-process CSS with whatever extra stuff you might put into it. Practically it is BabelJS for CSS, with lots of plugins already created by the community. There is also CSSnext plugin that allows you to start using CSS4 features. The issue with current project we have is that all styles are in LESS, which somewhat limits what you can do. Since LESS must be compiled first, you can't put any non-less syntax into it - and so CSS4 features will have to wait. You can still do lots - like lint styles against Can I Use database, and make automatic fallbacks for older browsers. It's hard to be excited about CSS, but Andrey Sitnik somehow made it possible.

####Video

Finally tried Microsoft Hyperlapse Pro preview on Windows by feeding it one of my skydiving videos. It took quite a while to process it, and to be completely honest the result wasn't great. I think Hyperlapse app from Instagram on the phone would perform better in this situation - but that's kind of unfair comparison. There are no gyro or motion sensors on GoPro or sport cameras in general, yet there is a need for hyperlapsing (or maybe that's just me). I think GoPro will get sensors in the next 1-2 generations, and then things will be much easier. But for now smartphone is the tool for hyperlapsing.

####Gadgets

We got a smoothie machine, and so far it's been incredible. Main feature of this machine is 4 detachable bottles of 2 different sizes. Get a bottle, put ingredients, smooth everything together, detach a bottle and take it with you. Large version of the bottle is enough to replace a good breakfast - especially if you put a generous amount of peanut butter and cocoa into it. Must research smoothies with coffee.

####Writing

Finished a blog on our trip to Corfu island - accompanied with short film. Also iA Writer is amazing and actually helps with the process. Write - leave it to cool down - review - edit - repeat.