Hello, J/interactive attendees! I'm excited to be here today to show you a few things about creating CGI scenes in Unit and shooting and publishing 360 videos. Here's a short version of the slides I showed.

But first, I want to showcase some of the amazing work our VRStorytelling students have done at the Newhouse school. Now in its third semester, VRStorytelling is on track to having over 50 students graduate in May with hands-on experience producing content for VR headsets. Here are some of the best so far.

360 Videos

• The Sour Sitrus Society concert band in 360.
• A 360 of a wind ensemble concert.
• Hang out with therapy pets.
• Spend a day in the life with a campus police officer.
• Stand inside a dance ensemble.
• And in the non-journalism categories, enter a 360 horror film (if you dare), and sit inside a card game gone bad.
• You can find more in our class YouTube account.  If you have an iPhone, download the Littlstar app and go to our Littlstar account. You can then view these in a Google Cardboard viewer from your iPhone. (Android users can do the same, or use the YouTube links above).
• Finally, every assignment from our students is posted to the Student Work category, so you can follow them on their journeys throughout the semester.

360 How-To's

Now that you've tried some videos, let's go over how to create them.

STEP 1 is to get a 360 camera rig, which is really a bunch of GoPro Hero 4 cameras stuck together with bubblegum and ... er, with a 3D-printed case. Here's a worksheet that we used to price out our nine 360 rigs that may help you with your own. Note that if you have a 3D printer you will save a lot of money, because commercial cases for these rigs can cost $500 or more each.

STEP 2 is to get video stitching software. This is the software that takes all of the videos from those cameras and pulls them together into one continuous, but warped, video that gets stretched around in a distortion sphere to create the 3D effect. You will want to get the AutoPano Video Pro + AutoPano Giga combo package. APV stitches your videos, and APG fine-tunes the stitching to remove things like ghosting.

360 Tip Sheets

The following tip sheets and videos will help you as you begin to teach yourself how to stitch and publish. Kudos to my colleague Professor Ken Harper and grad assistant Aron Nah for helping put the tip sheets together!

• Pre-Production Shooting
• Shooting 360
• Post-Production Shooting
• AutoPano Video Main Interface
• Advanced Stitching in AutoPano Giga

Creating CGI Scenes with Unity

As cool as 360s are, deep down I feel like the real power of VR is unleashed with computer-generated imagery. And in fact, over time it's very clear from people like John Carmack at Oculus that even video will eventually need to be processed in the cloud using CGI. Lightfield videography, which holds he promise of letting you walk through recorded "360" or "3D" scenes, will absolutely require this.

But for now, CGI is distinct from 360 video. You can download Unity online and use it for free. Unless you're doing stuff with video in Unity (which doesn't work that well yet by the way), you won't need a pro account.

Unity Tip Sheets & Videos

• Unity Basics screencasts for what was shown in class
• Unity's official essential training videos