Google ready to put ‘Pearl’ in 360-degree spotlight
Animated short gets its close-up at I/O
Google is bringing the film festival to the developers circuit to show just how slick 360-degree virtual-reality filmmaking can be.
Its Pearl animated short is the latest high-end VR production to come from Google’s Spotlight Stories division, formed to showcase genre-bending uses of VR for mobile viewing on YouTube and VR systems such as HTC Vive or Google’s Cardboard.
Pearl, currently on the festival circuit after debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2D this year, is expected to be touted heavily by Google at this week’s I/O developer conference.
In seeking to create VR content, “We asked the question, given the technology, what kind of new things could people make?” says project lead Rachid El Guerrab, who will speak Friday at I/O about VR.
Google wanted “to show off what’s possible,” he adds.
Google and Facebook are locked in an arms race to promote virtual reality, both via 360-degree videos and virtual reality headsets, cameras and software.
Both Google and Facebook offer the ability to view 360 videos in the Facebook News Feed and on Google’s YouTube/360 channel. Google has developed an elaborate, 16-lens VR camera and software system called Jump, while Facebook looked to trump Jump in April with the introduction of its own prototype for a 17lens VR camera.
Google and Facebook both look to VR as the next major computing platform. Google’s $20 Cardboard VR viewer connects to smartphones as a screen and is working on a standalone VR headset that doesn’t reed a smartphone to power it. Facebook, meanwhile, owns Oculus, which released its high-end VR console this year.
Osborne says he would recommend fellow filmmakers give 360 a try. “There’s a connection people get that’s different from watching a film on a screen,” he says. “You’re part of it.”