Clyde DeSouza's Blog, page 5

MAYA – The Book-cover Augmented Reality Experience:

Using Augmented Reality, the Book cover of MAYA brings to life characters from the story, allowing their “Digital Surrogates” to enter the real world.

Readers who pick up the book at any of the book stores, will be able to take a “selfie” with Dan or Maya simply by aiming their camera phones at the book cover in book-stores or at home.

Steps to bring alive Dan or Maya:

Download the free Junaio app for iOS or Android from Itunes or GooglePlay.

Once the app starts, press “scan” while aiming the phone or tablet’s camera at the cover image of the book.
Wait until the “MAYA” channel loads (can take a few seconds depending on internet speed and data/3G/Wifi charges may apply)
Read the brief help message and dismiss the info screen by clicking the “X” icon.
The Phones camera will now switch to the front facing camera.
Hold the book cover next to your face and See Dan or Maya appear live – next to you.
Click anywhere on the screen to take a “Snapshot” selfie.

Readers can then post these selfies to “MAYA’s” profile page on Facebook or tweet it directly from the app.

Today, people in Long Distance Relationships (LDRs) interact with each other across the miles – as do Dan and Maya – in the story.

Dan’s work involves creating commercially viable Augmented Reality solutions. His girlfriend Maya, and her family return to their homeland due to her father’s illness.

Dan and Maya continue their relationship via “Digital Surrogates”, experiencing human touch through haptics. If you were in a long distance relationship, but could “see” and “feel” your lover in your living room, sitting right next as you… would distance matter?

Ongoing AR experiences from the story are planned allowing readers to bond with the characters in the book, seeing them right in their own living rooms or locations similar to those described in the book.

 

The “MAYA” book-cover project is live!

Readers need only download the free Junaio app from Google Play or Itunes and scan a printout of the book cover (or aim their cell phones at the screen image above) to take a “Selfie” with DAN or MAYA – the main characters in the novel.

When your front facing camera recognizes the book cover, it superimposes a “living” Digital Surrogate of Maya alongside yourself.

MAYA is the Print edition of “Memories with Maya” and will hit Bookstores across India and the Asia Subcontinent,3rd week of March 2015.

The book is published by Penguin. Counting down!

I'd like to code a vowel bot to correct/delete the current scourge of the vowel cannibalization going on. A 'txtng' artifact that's crept into mainstream writing. Wht d'y thnk abt tht?

Meanwhile, one wikipedia crusader is at it... cleansing wikipedia of "Comprised of"
http://gizmodo.com/mans-wikipedia-edi...

 

Let’s re-invent the Comic book “page”

MAYA the motion comic is based on the screenplay of the hard scifi novel Memories with Maya, which has been picked by Penguin|Randomhouse for a March 2015 print release, after the novel’s successful debut on Amazon.

The novel has been reviewed favorably on high profile sites such as iO9.com and Mashable and made it to theIEET’s list of publications, sharing space with other noteworthy sci-fi novels.

But… This is about the 360 Motion Comic:

 

I’m excited to explore this uncharted land, the challenges, and rewards of visual storytelling in Virtual Reality.  The grammar and rules for this exciting medium have not yet been defined, and I’d like to reach out to you to make it happen, through MAYA.

Read more about the project.. Here.

Immersive Story telling in 360 Stereo 3D:

They say you shouldn't hijack the head-tracking data stream of the Oculus Rift; visuals should not be separated from the human vestibular system...but rules were meant to be broken. Why? because there's so much more to VR than gaming.

This is not to say games aren't becoming movies! I found myself strangely immersed in Naughty Dog's "Last of Us", more than any tent-pole movie I've seen in the past few months. Such is the power of CG movies, un-canny valley be damned.
Defining a language for 360 look-around movies:
You know how it all began oh so long ago (OK, 4 years ago) when the language of film-making was being defined / re-written for S3D. Well, time for a re-write again. Immersive 360 film-making is set to explode; geared for an audience of teens to mid forties - at least at the start, and telling stories in this medium is quite a different skill-set to master.



Citizen Kane, back in the day, although a 2D film, had given enough clues to modern 3D film-makers on how to effectively use the medium of S3D… but no one really had the patience to listen. Lighting, Depth of field and yes – even hijacking the head-tracking stream can work when creating movies on a 360 canvas.

When I started investigating this exciting medium a few months ago, alarm bells would go off when I asked on Oculus Rift / Game Engine forums about intercepting head-tracking and orientation info of these devices, but that's because so far it's only games that have been designed for VR. It's soon becoming evident that apart from the gimmicky interactive look-around voyeuristic possibilities offered by the medium, serious Directors and storytellers will look at retaining control of the "frame" if they are to be enticed into creating movies in Virtual Reality.

So what could an immersive 360 Director's tool-box look like?

Lighting - With the temptation to look around a scene, a Director and VR DoP can use the age-old technique of spot-lighting areas of importance.
360 Positional Sound - Wait until Dolby Atmos gets interested - Chances are an Atmos SDK might already be in the works to create scound-scapes that can aid in directing an audience's attention.
Depth of Field - The pet peeve of Steresoscopic 3D film-making, unless done correctly. This technique is worth exploring in an immersive 360 environment, to guide audience attention. At least it won't be a lead-by-the-nose experience, as it's sometimes abused by inexperienced DPs and Directors on 2D films.
Limiting the Horizontal FoV - There is no rule per se that every scene should feature full wrap-around 360 views of the scene for the audience to explore. The horizontal field of view can be restricted for certain shots. This is a creative call, and is what will contribute to the flavor of the overall movie experience being crafted by the film-maker.


Advanced Tools for Immersive 360 Storytelling:








GreenScreening the Crew out:

Compositing in 360:



Images of the 6 individual Cubes are here:

Again, there's every reason to believe, a competent NUKE programmer-artist could write the warping matrix to composite elements directly over a spherical or equirectangular sequence of images or video.



Virtual Reality Film making Gear:

Capture: The current camera system used by Jaunt VR is said to be a rig based on 14 GoPro cameras in stereoscopic config to capture a wrap-around view of a scene in S3D. Now - I'll admit i'm sitting on the fence about actual "scanline" level CMOS sync of go-pros in a stereo config, much less 7 pairs of them!... yet, I'll give the rig and the experts behind it, the benefit of the doubt. It's possible that sync drift is non-existent in today's oscillators/controllers.

Stereo 3D Conversion Houses: 360 Film making might actually put the spotlight on 2D to 3D conversion. -  A much needed service for film-makers and a new Business avenue for conversion studios to explore!  Compositing in stereo 3D on the stitched 360 image is only a few Nuke nodes away for competent conversion houses.

Software:

[youtube id="w3kJ9BZz_-8"]

For MAYA - a 360 Motion novel, I've chosen the excellent Cinema Director from Cinema-Suite. It's the closest one can get to an NLE system for an otherwise scripting heavy Game Engine such as Unity. Yes, to create immersive 360 video there is no straightforward way to do it in any of the popular video editing solutions. There is a bit of scripting in Javascript or C# to do anything creative with Unity or other Game Engines.

I had to customize the software to a certain extent to get the desired tools I needed to do those cuts for the Oculus Rift.

Most NLE systems were late to catch the Stereoscopic 3D train, the same will probably be the case for 360 VR support. Toolkits will need to be written to control different aspects of a VR experience. So what would a time-line look like for an immersive 360 VR film? - Take a look at a screenshot for MAYA, below.


(click for larger)
Immersive VR eye-wear:
Credit for the device that started the VR revival would go to the Oculus Rift. The recent acquisition of the Oculus Rift for a staggering $2 Billion by FaceBook should prove that VR is here to stay. Equally important are initiatives and products coming out from Sony with it's Morpheus eyewear, Samsung's own venture, and a special nod to long time VR headwear experts TDVision and their soon to be released ImmersiON VR eyewear.

Smart phones can easily be converted to immersive 360 video playback hardware. The Durovis Dive, and even Google's "Cardboard" show how low cost this could be.


Immersive 360 Film-making: Content
The hardware and software is becoming available at a quicker pace than the talent to produce Immersive 360 content. Are audiences ready?

Gamers have always wanted beefier gaming rigs (laptops), and the same holds true for their screens. With VR devices, it's like having an Imax strapped to their faces. Yes they are ready - and they'd like to watch their movies the same way. But VR is not limited to gamers. The luxury of an immersive large screen environment and the privacy and intimacy it offers cannot be discounted. A long haul flight is but one venue that comes to mind where VR eye-wear would be in high demand...

Education is another. Already 360 documentaries, complete with Sir Attenborough's voice are being readied for when these devices go mainstream....
As a film-maker, will your storytelling skills evolve for the next generation of audiences?

 

Clyde DeSouza is currently working on a self-funded 360 Motion comic based on the screenplay "MAYA".  The project is at: http://igg.me/at/maya360. All contributions welcome. Perks include on-screen end credits. 

I've updated the plot in Memories with Maya to conform to the Screenplay being developed.

Expect a few interesting turn of events, plot devices and a further tightening of the story.

The updated version is up on Amazon and SmashWords.
I've also kept it as a free download for reader's who've bought the paperback version from Amazon.

Enjoy the read!
I'm grateful for the feedback.

Kind Regards.

 

Genre: Psychological Sci-fi

Logline: When an egocentric Virtual Reality expert visiting India on a Govt. project loses his girlfriend to a terrorist incident, nothing will stop him – not even Divine Providence – from bringing her back.

On BlckLst: http://bit.ly/1lGvLWF

The screenplay is based on “Memories with Maya”.

The protagonist, Daniel, (Dan) late 20s, hacks his destiny every step of the way. He is egocentric, and makes no bones about it. For Dan, logic rules, and “faith” is for the weak.

The story also looks at how current and emerging technology becomes an integral part of human intimate relationships…even after death.  The story details how Augmented Reality & Artificial Intelligence will merge – allowing us to spawn Digital Surrogates in our own likeness – our DIRROGATES.

“Memories with Maya” the novel, has been received well on such respected science and sci-fi sites such as iO9.com, Mashable, The IEET, and the Huffington Post.

——————————————————–

While movies like “Her”, “Transcendence”  and other AI movies have a lot of fantasy woven in with the science…

The Dirrogate has:

- Hard science, which has been praised in reviews and has been excepted and referenced by articles on KuwzweilAI, Mashable, the popular science site i09.com and even the Huffington Post

- With scenes set in real locations in India (Bombay) – a huge demographic (late teens – 40) gets targeted, guaranteeing commercial viability

- One of the few psychological Sci-fi screenplays out there. No aliens, no superpowers, no time-travel … Oh Wait! (spoiler)

 

 

Print and e-book rights deal inked with Penguin Books for India, and Asian subcontinent.

Memories with Maya will be in print in bookstores in these countries; early 2015.

Film, Merchandising and rest-of-world rights are available.