Creating 360 Gameplay Videos

[jashan]

While I very much agree with the sentiment that 360 videos are not VR, I'm trying to find better ways to illustrate virtual reality gameplay for people that don't have the actual target hardware.

My attempts so far were adding more or less static cameras and "filming" the player's headset and hands (or controllers), filming the actual physical world (players with headset in the room where they are playing) and adding what the player sees in VR in a smaller area of the screen (as some people reportedly even get sick when playing FPS-style games on normal monitors, I'd assume that this demographic will also not appreciate the crazy rotations you see when you simply put what a player sees in the headset on a normal 2D screen).

A little illustration of this is available here: Holodance Game View Demo, and with a more recent version of the game (where I removed the rhythmic rotation which had exactly the effect I wanted to avoid), here: Holodance Alpha 5 Gameplay Edited.

However, I think there's a lot of people who have GearVR or any of the other low-cost, low-end VR solutions without positional tracking that work really well with 360° video ... so ... wouldn't it be awesome if we could create 360° gameplay videos right out of the engine?

Has anyone tried or successfully done this, yet?

In Unity, the maximum field of view is 179°, so I guess even with post-effects this will be kind of tricky to set up.

[Black Blade]

I am pretty surprised these topic got no replays so far

Over all i do agree, i like something like that as well, now that YouTube has its 360o YouTube videos, i think these may be needed for VR games videos.. i mean you can take someone down an ally, and show him.. but it will not give him the right feeling i think, if its not his VR self that walks down there that will really get they ready for the game

[The Maddog]

I get what you're saying and to be honest, I've not seen anything like this. I would suspect we wont see it for sometime, if at all as well. The reason being most VR demos, games and experiances are rendered in real time and it sucks up a lot of GFX processing power. From my understanding just recording normal video of a VR game causes "some" minor issues (certainly a FPS drop). To up this to a 360° recording would cause serious problems.

Since I've just beed reading about 360° cameras having, in some cases, real overheating problems my money says (for now) trying to record a game in 360° whilst playing a VR game would tax the GFX card so much it would melt.

Could be wrong and maybe sli is a work around but will have to see.

[Black Blade]

Originally posted by The Maddog:

I get what you're saying and to be honest, I've not seen anything like this. I would suspect we wont see it for sometime, if at all as well. The reason being most VR demos, games and experiances are rendered in real time and it sucks up a lot of GFX processing power. From my understanding just recording normal video of a VR game causes "some" minor issues (certainly a FPS drop). To up this to a 360° recording would cause serious problems.

Since I've just beed reading about 360° cameras having, in some cases, real overheating problems my money says (for now) trying to record a game in 360° whilst playing a VR game would tax the GFX card so much it would melt.

Could be wrong and maybe sli is a work around but will have to see.

Well i think may be able to just record the same part a few times and each time set to record a deffrent part..
But well it being new and all, i guess will see what some or we will be able to make to get it done