Check out my Tunnel Vision VR360 test. Having access to Vision Pro gives me a chance to start making immersive video. As a content creator, I couldn’t be more excited. There are a variety of formats out there, but I wanted to start with a quick test of VR360.
How It Works
It is probably easier to explain by showing you what I did first. In the clip below, you’ll see me opening up my Tunnel Vision VR360 file in the Moon Player for Apple Vision Pro. It’s a free app that lets you play a variety of 2D and immersive videos. Once the video is playing, it is fully immersive. You can see 360 degrees all around you as well as above and below.
One of the challenges of recording video in Vision Pro is that it’s currently limited to 1080P video. That’s a limited field of vision, and nowhere near what you see when wearing the headset. Fortunately, Youtube supports uploading immersive videos, so I was able to upload Tunnel Vision VR360 directly. If you don’t have some kind of headset, you can use your mouse or move the arrows to pan around and see what my simple test looks like.
How Tunnel Vision VR360 Is Made
To make Tunnel Vision VR360, I used Cinema 4D by Maxon. I created a simple project with a camera and a light. Then I added a long cylinder, oriented on the Z axis. Over the course of 600 frames, I moved the cylinder forward, which make it look like I was moving slowly through a tunnel.
I textured the tunnel with an Adobe Substance material that I had been fooling with recently, and that was that. I’ve been familiar with the process of making a VR360 video for a while, but since I didn’t have any work that required it, and I didn’t have access to equipment I could use to test and experiment, I never went there.
The process is really simple in Cinema 4D. Select your camera and click on the Object tab. Then in the drop-down menu for Projection type, choose Spherical. Then in your render settings, for your output resolution use a 2:1 aspect ratio. In my case I went with 4096 x 2048. It would have looked better in higher resolution, but I wanted something quick.
Looking at the finished Tunnel Vision VR360 test, I do wish I had spent some more time on lighting. The clip looks very dark, and that’s my fault. It would have absolutely been worth the time to put a few more lights in that cylinder, and maybe chosen or created a better material. The good news is the Tunnel Vision VR360 test was successful, everything worked as I expected. I look forward to making more immersive videos in the future.
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