vr – DEATH TO THE FLIPPERS

Gods of Egypt: Battle for Eternity

The world’s first purpose built VR roller coaster. Directed by Gavin and based in Lionsgate Entertainment World in Zhuhai, China. Working alongside Thinkwell Group.

This roller coaster ride takes in the whole movie, including sneaking through the city and night to break into the vault, weaving past giant fire breathing cobras in underground tunnels and blasting the evil god Set into a giant spire that explodes to bring light back to the land… it’s all in there.

As we were building this roller coaster from scratch to be a VR experience we chose to have a powered vehicle that we could control to mimic the movement in the VR visuals. This enabled us to traverse the whole track twice giving a very different feel on each lap without the guests realizing, and fitting a what seems like a huge rides into a relatively small space.

The Twilight Saga: Midnight Ride

Gavin directed this VR motorbike ride for Lionsgate Entertainment world in Zhuhai, China, working alongside Thinkwell Group. The ride is loosely based on the events of Twilight: Eclipse, which has the riders teaming up with Jacob Black, as they race through the forest with the black pack of werewolves drawing out the evil newborn vampire army.

The ride won a Thea award for outstanding achievement and was one of the first full scale high throughput VR attraction in the world which gives riders agency of thier actions. Riders have full control of thier bikes, being able to seek out different paths through the forest, discovering hidden jumps and tunnels, and choose how to avoid the attacking vampires.

Artists and developers across Framestore’s London, New York and Montreal studies were involved in this major project.

Fiat: VR Dynamo, The Power of X

Our first project at Framestore – A virtual reality experience with Dynamo and the new Fiat 500X.

Above is a short teaser of what you see inside the experience, to see the real thing you’ll need to see it in an Oculus Rift at one of the many car shows or dealerships it’s being demonstrated in across 19 regions of Europe. Or just download the Google Cardboard version here.

The full Oculus Rift experience includes maybe the world’s first illusion in VR, as well as 4D seat rumbling effects. I can’t tell you what the actual trick is, that would spoil it the magic, but we worked with Dynamo to make sure he was happy with the trick we designed.

Dynamo was shot as live action, but everything else is computer generated imagery, including a completely photo real car. Creating the CG for this was a monstrous task. To work in VR, we had to make 2 videos (one for each eye), each at extremely high resolution (4K) and running at 60fps. To render this we used Framestore’s render farm at full capacity, each frame of footage taking 90% of the processing power as Gravity did. Rending it on a single computer would take 184 years.