VR content creator Figment Productions is releasing its recent cinematic experience Kinch and the Double World on the Viveport app store and Viveport Infinity.
Available on Vive Focus headsets from July 3, the magical fantasy adventure has been shown and highly praised at VR conferences and film festivals worldwide and is now available to experience for the first time via HTC’s platforms.
Kinch and the Double World is a VR fantasy adventure set in Victorian London. It tells the story of Kinch, an orphan who gets caught up in a stage magician’s trick and is transported to another world, where magic is real.
The experience was the product of an 18-month Innovate UK funded research project known as ALIVE that explored cinematic VR storytelling. Working closely with Foundry and the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey, they developed production techniques and technologies for the creation of immersive VR experiences.
Simon Reveley, CEO of Figment, said: “Our role in the ALIVE project was to take our years of media production experience and to apply the new technologies to a real-life production scenario: our very own cinematic VR short film. The final experience incorporates 360 video, CGI, VFX, pre-rendered and real-time animations, LIDAR scanned environments as well as live action and motion captured characters.”
Figment delivered VR experiences to over four million people via its installations around the world including Galactica at Alton Towers and Derren Brown’s Ghost Train at Thorpe Park, both UK, Kraken Unleashed at SeaWorld Orlando, US and The Great Lego Race at Legoland parks around the world.
Kinch and the Double World is Figment’s first foray into cinematic VR but the team is also focused on location-based VR. It is developing multi-user walk-through adventures using its own hyper-reality platform, blending cinematic VR with free roam VR and featuring tactile props and sets, physical 4D effects and a realistic avatar system, codenamed Project Helix.
