Wevr is both creative and highly technical, and we’ve engineered camera capture systems since the nascent days of VR video. Our team members are masters of their craft who have been making and telling stories for years across various forms of media. We’re proud to have teamed up with some of the best and brightest creative minds out there, and even prouder that they chose us to implement their visions.
Wevr has been exploring immersive storytelling since the early days of Oculus’ Kickstarter campaign. We’ve worked with the GearVR since its first prototypes launched in March 2014, and in May 2014 Samsung included theBlu as one of its initial launch titles. In November that same year, Wevr was the first company to get access to Valve/HTC’s Vive prototype, which was affectionately called the “-1 Dev. Kit”. theBlu Encounter would be the first demo shown on the Vive at HTC’s launch event in Barcelona in March 2015, as well as at Valve’s Game Developers Conference unveiling in San Francisco later that month.
From these experiences, we’ve developed our own toolkit of best practices to deliver presence with zero nausea for both 360video on mobile HMDs and room-scale interactive VR on PC/console-based HMDs.
We learned early on that the various directors we collaborate with all needed different camera rig configurations. Instead of working with a one-size-fits-all set up, we work with a range of cameras including GoPros, machine vision cameras, REDs, and new systems coming to market. Our pipeline is camera agnostic. We’ve made innovations in the rendering of stereo pairs on mobile displays in order to preserve image resolution. Every part of the production process matters, all the way from the source camera, to the data ingest process, down to encoding, and ultimately playback and on-device rendering.
For our room-scale experiences we work with Unity, Unreal and our own proprietary Transport™ Engine. VR experiences can be passive or interactive. In passive experiences, the viewer is essentially a fly on the wall, an invisible visitor; they get to sit back and enjoy the experience. Interactive experiences, however, invite the user to participate and interact with the virtual environment and its characters; they are part of the story. Room-scale, interactive VR experiences give the user an added opportunity to move around in an immersive volume, leveraging the sophisticated input controllers provided by the HMD device manufacturers.