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Heralding in the New Year, Motionographer recently posted their 6 Motion Design Industry Predictions for 2015, one of which highlighted the flood of work the arrival of Virtual Reality (VR) and VR platforms such as Magic Leap and Oculus Rift will bring in.
For those not in the know, apparently 2015 is the year the major VR players will start to showcase their VR gear and projects, which will allow you to have the virtual worlds of Games and Films to be projected around you.
The general consensus when it comes to VR, is that the user will be required to wear head gear featuring 360 tracking (please try your best to put aside Total Recall memories) with some gaming and short film projects already completed and others in production.
Oculus Rift, an independent company who seem to be taking the lead in the VR race, have been going full steam ahead. They raised $2.4 million for the development of Oculus Rift with help from Facebook who agreed to buy them back in March 2014.
The other team in the VR game is Magic Leap, this time backed by tech head honcho Google, who made a solid investment of $542 million in Magic Leap. Let’s just put those comments about Google Glasses to one side for now...
Magic Leap are in the process of creating a VR platform that will do anyway with the headgear and instead project the virtual world around you, or as aptly put by Motionographer: “Magic Leap appears to take an opposite approach (to Oculus), promising to convincingly integrate objects into the real world, probably by projecting light directly onto the user’s retina with some not-yet-revealed, mind-blowing technology.†All sounds a bit too Sci-Fi at this point…
Samsung and Sony have also thrown flags in; Sony have already created a headset for their PS4 called Morpheus (which has been in production since 2010,) although this has not hit the market yet, and Samsung recently rushed their VR Gear onto the market. While it’s still in beta stage, it links with the Samsung Note and has a number of games out already. (You can find a review of the Gear VR from TechRadar here.)
Recent VR projects have included both games and short films. Oculus’s in-house production studio, Oculus Story Studio, released their first short film called LOST which was premiered at Sundance this year, and well known London based Production company Framestore created a Game of Thrones VR experience entitled Ascend the Wall for SXSW.
While VR is clearly a new area of design currently trying to find it’s legs, the ultimate question is; is there a place in a normal
 consumer market for it? Issues such as motion sickness and product price will have a huge part to play in answering this and 2015 will be the year that we start finding out.
But the exciting prospect is the new work this will open for the Motion Design industry. 2015 will be the year that genuine interest in VR platforms will start to catch on and hopefully this flood of new work that Motionographer have predicted will start to rush in.
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4th February saw the annual Broadcast Awards back at Grosvenor House in London, celebrating another year’s worth of quality TV and programming.
The night also doubled as the Broadcast Awards 20th Anniversary which they celebrated to full effect with 1,500 industry attendees and proceedings hosted by David Walliams.
Big winners on the night included BBC 1 for Channel of the Year, XFactor owned by FremantleMedia for International Programme Sales, Love Productions for Best Independent Production House and Match of the Day for the Special Recognition Award.
There was also a special live vote on the night for Best Show, with the winner picked out from 20 years of previous winners, the champion being The Office. Good call, we just hope there were a number of David Brent dance routine impressions after all the champagne…
A big congratulations to our friends at ENVY who won for Best Post Production House, as many of you know and have experienced, ENVY have hosted many of our freelancer events in the past and to great success!
To see the full list of winners click here.
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So by now we all know how Birdman owned The Oscars this year, picking up a collection of Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Achievement in Cinematography.
Well, we were happier to hear that Whiplash (the office favourite of the Awards bunch) picked up the gong for Achievement in Film Editing, which it wholeheartedly deserved in our eyes! Not forgetting J K Simmons' win for Best Supporting Actor for his stand out role in the film.
Whiplash managed to beat out other contenders including, Boyhood, The Imitation Game, The Grand Budapest Hotel and American Sniper.
And not forgetting the Achievement for Visual Effects which saw Interstellar triumph. Personally we were surprised by its overall lack of nominations so we're happy to see it take the VFX Award home, beating out Captain America, Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy and X-Men.
What did you think of this year's ceremony and collection of winners? Any surprises and snubs?
Full List of the Oscar 2015 Winners click here.
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