Rampa
The Virtual camera man Idea is Ok but I don't think the "look at" idea will work mostly because you can't control the camera angle. I'm finding that you really want to keep your camera horizontal to the plane you want the audience to be in and let the audience look up or down to get the effect you want. If you look up or down with the camera it slants the whole viewing plane. I did this rather badly in the intro to my latest Blade Runner 360 video
The title looks pretty cool in VR, until you pan around and see the viewing plane is skewed and so the title is slanted. Admittedly I never really noticed it until I added the title so I suspect the brain compensates for the slanted environment. I think a better way to add dramatic effect from camera angle would be to keep the camera fixed to the horizontal plane of your scene and move the camera up and down to get the desired viewing angle.
1. Using it with your virtual camera man idea could be don by adding a dummy object to the root of object that your camera can link to and track to the axis of the object your looking at in a horizontal plane. From there you should be able to move the camera vertically and rotate about the dummy object to get the effect you want.
2. If you are trying to do a POV from a character in the video, you could link the camera to the head of an invisible avatar. Also you could create a virtual body by making the head and all its pieces (eyes/mouth) transparent. You might want to cap the neck with a flesh color disk to hide the hole. I don't know how jarring the head motion of walking and running would be. If this proves to jarring you might be able to constrain the camera to the horizontal plane (can you actually do that?). I might need to do some experimenting to see what works best.
The use of jump cuts may be jarring but probably not a lot more than they are in a regular videos; I suspect we get use to it. There is a Muse VR Music video that use a lot of cuts but does a good job at fading in and out to make the transitions smooth. The big problem I see that if some one is looking around when you jump he may miss something you want him to see. The MUSE VR tends to have things happening all around you so you are constantly looking around and the jumps actually bring more events in front of your view. In a less clutter or more focused plot you will have to keep the attention of the audience on the character or event you want.
The sound clues are indeed important but unfortunately Iclone does not support them. Eventually RL should consider making iclone support more complete VR. Going stereoscopic should be easy (since they actually do that. the audio thing is significantly harder. Theoretically they could use the sound and location associated with each avatar and prop to generate the associated vr audio file but I suspect that's not a simple task. They may see if they can find some 3d party app that they can send the VR data too and have it build and render the file, much like they do with indigo. Hmm Can indigo do 360? might have to try
Ray Higgins
4D Fans
