/Dew_VR_Skate

Firstborn created a 360" live-action video VR experience where famous sk.a.t.e.boarders were filmed skating through Las Vegas. Then, during the Brooklyn leg of Mountain Dew's “Dew Tour”, visitors were invited to experience it as a 2-minute VR ride using the Oculus Rift DK1.

During the ride, they were also filmed for 10 seconds and could later share that experience as a split-screen YouTube video.

With Anthony Tripaldi as a lead developer creating the actual VR application using Cinder, my role was to develop a secondary application (also in Cinder) that would run from a separate computer. This application recorded a camera feed, recomposed it as a split-screen video showing the visitor's in-VR point of view, and encoded it so it could be uploaded to YouTube for sharing. It talked to the VR application through the network (using OSC) so it would know when to start and stop the recording, as well as the direction the visitor was looking at.

This project was a great opportunity to get my C++ juices flowing again. I hadn't worked with the language in any serious way in many years, and was certainly excited to see what Cinder was capable of. It did not disappoint.

While I was not the lead developer in this project, I was very proud of my overall role in it. I had brought my own Oculus Rift DK1 to the office months before, and used it in numerous demos to the company and to clients. That culminated in plenty of VR project ideas. I like to believe it is what got the concept of this project started, as well as many other similar VR projects that Firstborn developed since then.

In the end, I also helped run Mountain Dew's booth for Dew Tour in Brooklyn, and demoed the experience to hundreds of people (most of them Sk.a.t.e.boarding fans). It was pretty refreshing seeing everyone's vastly positive reactions to it.