VR & AR
We bring Virtual Reality experiences to the next level. As VR makers, we design experiences focused on brands that want to deliver to their users exciting and new moments never live before.
As experience designers, we really care about users. Despite VR is not a new medium, it’s still easy to find a lack of design and usability in many apps, which often makes VR experiences frustrating or even annoying. And this is because VR is not like anything else you’ve play before.
Here at Imagin&Tonic we design every moment in your VR experience as if it was a trip. And the trip starts even before you wear your VR glasses. We consider every touchpoint between the user and the experience itself, which includes the vr-glasses, user interfaces, hardware controllers (or the lack of them), what user sees and hears but also things like user’s health or the space around her.
A VR experience should serve one purpose (including, of course, get fun) and there’s where our job starts. From children to hardcore gamers, from newbies to techies, all them loves VR experiences and there’s one perfect for everybody.
VIDEO 360
We produce, edit and deploy 360 videos for online distribution and VR environments.
As producers, we take care of the whole process from scripting to recording in location and prepare the videos for distribution in platforms as Youtube or Facebook.
As VR developers, we combine 360 videos with 3D generated content that can be deployed as VR apps for mobile platforms such as android and iOS (using Google Cardboard glasses) or Samsung GearVR.
Preliminar 360 photos help us to visualize and prepare the location before the final shooting.
Designing the Experience
We start by creating a visual wireframe of the experience based on the script agreed with the customer. For this script, we integrate a graphical content with 3D elements, with an avatar that represents the user, so the customer can see the scene from an “outside” point of view.
The script is made based in several considerations: the video will be consumed from Youtube or in a VR environment? is it a consumer or an enterprise app? will be consumed at home or in a public event? is the time length a decisive factor?
Pre-production works
Once in location, we make 360 pictures for quick pre-visualization. This step in the process allows us to detect points of interest, caveats, and potential problems during recording. Most important, is a friendly and productive support for communication with the project lead and make decisions before starting the recording process.
Visual script
After all videos have been recorded, a selection of clip is made, selected from all the recorded material. We use stereoscopic images in this script, so the whole scene is shown in the document. One page is made for each different scene, and one final page resumes the whole process.
Preparing 360 videos for deployment is a new challenge for video editors. We start by selecting the clips to be edited and stitch the images captured to create the 360 images. Then a laborious process starts for image normalization and optimization. Balancing exposure, light and colorimetry in a 360 environment in 4K or 5K video files requires huge processing capacity.
Integrating with the VR Environment
Some 360 videos are aimed to be consumed on YouTube, Facebook and other platforms, while some others are part of a VR experience, that must be consumed using a VR hardware. Usually videos recorded for VR can be shared also in the web. But not the opposite. Recording for VR requires several considerations to avoid user sickness.
A VR video-experience usually is composed by a 360 video and some 3D elements over it, like menus, interaction points, or characters.
