The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset won’t be commercially launching until the first quarter of 2016, but the company behind it – Facebook subsidiary Oculus VR – is pressing on with creating films for the device.
Having created a Story Studio division staffed by veterans from Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic and launched a short VR film called Lost in January 2015, Oculus has announced details of its second animation.
Henry – “a heartwarming comedy about a loveable hedgehog” – will be available later this year for anyone who owns an Oculus Rift development headset, and will be free for anyone buying the final model in early 2016.
“Henry the hedgehog is an original character created for virtual reality by Story Studio’s new consulting production designer Kendal Cronkhite, who designed the look of the Dreamworks Madagascar films, and Bernhard Haux, previously one of Pixar’s top character artists,” explained Oculus in a blog post.
The film, directed by another former Pixar creator, Ramiro Lopez Dau, will premiere in Los Angeles on 28 July, six months after Lost made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
When Oculus – which was bought by Facebook for $2bn in 2014 – launched Story Studio, its chief executive Brendan Iribe said the aim was to “support and inspire the community” of filmmakers exploring virtual reality.
Oculus Rift, together with Google Cardboard, Samsung’s Gear VR and other headsets in development, is sparking a flurry of creativity beyond the games industry, which was the first market targeted by these devices.
In January, filmmaker Chris Milk talked to the Guardian about his work on VR documentaries about the Millions March protest in New York, and the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.
“With virtual reality, I’m not interested in the novelty factor,” he said. “I’m interested in the foundations for a medium that could be more powerful than cinema, than theatre, than literature, than any other medium we’ve had before to connect one human being to another.”
Video distribution channels are also experimenting with virtual reality: notably YouTube, which recently launched a series of “360-degree” videos on its service.
“We don’t know how long VR is going to take and how large it’s going to be. We don’t know. But we know it’s somehow going to play an important role, and we therefore must have focus on it and have people working on it,” YouTube’s head of content and business operations Robert Kyncl told the Guardian this month.
