animating in virtual reality (VR)

watch our animations created within virtual reality (VR).

it will seem like you’re really there!

We’re getting ready to launch an exciting new service. With the help of VR, we’ll be enabling people to step inside stories that convey complex messages – having a sense of scale or place from product visualisations to pharma scenes.

We were thrilled when Fred, one of our animators, created a couple of videos to raise awareness of this cutting-edge technology.

The ideas were to put the viewer in the shoes of someone running the London Marathon, and animate the world around a smoking wizard. Having discovered painting and animation combined with VR, Fred was influenced by videos of the fantastically talented Goro Fujita. Here’s a link to his Instagram. Painter of gravity-free environments Cinta Vidal also influenced Fred.

Fred came to us with designs for the framework of the London Marathon animation, using a running man wearing a salamander costume as the core feature, with the world spinning at his feet.

He created illustrations of the runner in motion, and brought them to life with the Quill app that supports the Oculus Rift platform, both developed by Facebook. Quill allowed Fred to paint and animate in virtual reality on an infinitely scalable canvas.

Exporting the animation gave Fred an interesting challenge in terms of how he rotated the world, thinking about how he could use the spin in a way that made sense so it could roll beneath the runner’s feet.

Users can strap on a VR headset to immerse themselves in the stories and start seeing things from other perspectives.