Experience world of virtual reality at Imagine RIT

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A camera rig with 13 GoPro Hero3 cameras will combine with a gaming engine to help create virtual worlds during a virtual reality cinema exhibit inside Gannett Hall at Imagine RIT.

Students of RIT’s School of Film and Animation (SOFA) are developing a virtual reality movie system that will immerse viewers into a cinematic experience unlike any other during the 2015 Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival on May 2—a day designed to showcase the innovative and creative talents of RIT students, faculty and staff.

Virtual reality—also referred to as immersive multimedia or computer-simulated life—replicates an environment that simulates physical presence inside real or imagined worlds. It even can recreate sensory experiences, including virtual taste, sight, smell, sound and touch.

“Virtual reality is an up-and-coming medium and we wanted to try a live-action approach to what is typically a 3D animation,” said Victoria McGowen, a third-year motion picture bachelor’s and computer science master’s student from Washington, D.C. “Live-action virtual reality has a lot of complexities that worked with our skill sets and we wanted to learn how to tackle current problems with this medium.”

The team of 13 RIT motion picture science students is definitely up to the task, McGowen said, especially since “we all have an interest in film and with developing new technologies to make better movies.”

To create virtual worlds for Imagine RIT visitors, students are using the game engine Unity—a powerful development tool for creating multiplatform 3D and 2D games and interactive experiences—and 13 GoPro Hero3 cameras. The exhibit will be set up inside Gannett Hall’s Studio B, right around the corner from the always-popular “green screen” exhibit.

“We’re hoping to get people excited about virtual reality and movies,” McGowen said. “This exhibit will demonstrate the process of student filmmaking and give the audience some idea as to what all goes into a movie. The virtual reality side of our exhibit will hopefully show the capabilities of this new technology within the field of entertainment.”

McGowen—who, along with recently graduated motion picture science major Matthew Ross Donato of Reisterstown, Md., won the Louis F. Wolf Jr. Memorial Scholarship at the 2014 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) honors and awards ceremony last October—has high hopes for the demonstration even beyond Imagine RIT.

“We are trying to integrate our system into the School of Film and Animation so students can use the equipment on their future projects,” she said. “As far as we know, we are among the first group of students at a film school to explore moviemaking techniques with virtual reality deliverables.”

In addition to McGowen, other SOFA students who contributed to the exhibit include Hollie Grant, Sean Cooper, Elizabeth DoVale, Kayla Mouriz, Noah Kram, Matthew Setlow, Maxwell Pope, Elizabeth Pieri, Matt Bernstein, Anna Dining, Andrew Gillie, and Joshua Berkowitz.