Chris Milk & Beck: Hello Again
Where it all began
In 2012, while I was still living in Stockholm, my Stopp colleagues in LA were awarded a job to build the playback solution for an incredibly ambitious project by Chris Milk, with Lincoln Motor Company as the client. While I had been aware of 360° video for some time, I had not worked with it.
The experience features 3 synchronized 360° videos, two of which are shot from moving dollies, each with 8 channels of audio, and is around 9 minutes long.
A big challenge was to achieve omnidirectional binaural audio. Nowadays you'd use some variety of ambisonics, but at the time this was basically unheard of for the web. The solution was quad binaural, recorded using the iconic ears-for-eyes head designed by Chris. Initial audio implementation for the website was done by Dinahmoe, partially under my guidance.
With 10 days from shoot to site going live in February of 2013, this was an exercise in sleep deprivation and perseverance. I ran close to two hundred h.264 encoding tests to methodically try to find a sweet spot between Chris' discerning quality demands and file size. The nature of the content meant we dealt with massive amounts of dark gradients in sensitive color ranges and the notoriously compression-adverse curved motion vectors inherent with equirectangular projection. For me this was finally a chance to dive deep into video codec science after many years of lurking the doom9 forums, and tweaking codec parameters is something I enjoy doing to this day.
In the spring of 2013, Oculus' Dev Kit 1 came out of Kickstarter, and we immediately began porting the experience to this platform. Once it worked, it was an absolute revelation: This is how it was meant to be seen all along. We showed it to Oculus who in September 2013 gave us the HD prototype headsets.
The VR version, now with an improved playback engine for both video and audio, saw a soft launch at Future of StoryTelling in NYC in 2013 before it went on to show at Sundance Film Festival, SXSW and Tribeca Film Festival in 2014. By now I had moved to New York. (Trivia: We were one of Oculus' 3 demos in their showroom at SXSW, and Palmer Luckey was in the back room on the phone constantly. Two weeks later we found out what that was about: Facebook had bought Oculus.)
This project is also what sowed the seed for VRSE, since renamed Within, started by Chris Milk and with myself and two colleagues from the Beck project as advisors and partners in the company. In the spring of 2014 the Beck experience, including synchronized parallel videos, was the first prototype built for the Within platform, back then on a custom Galaxy S5 GearVR prototype.
