Synopsis: A look at Dutch yellowBird and their 360 degree interactive video platform.
Interactive video has a long way to go, but Netherlands based yellowBird and their 360 degree offering might help move it along.
We, as a species, watch a lot of vids. Buckets full, really. And for the most part, we're comfortable pressing play and being spoon-fed the story. This, at least in part, explains the lukewarm reception - commercially speaking - of interactive films. Most of the 'interactivity' centers on controlling the story.
It forces the viewer to make decisions and choose paths, determining the fate of the characters and ultimately the entire story experience. That's a lot of pressure considering most people can't tell a knock-knock joke without blowing the punch-line.
Dutch startup yellowBird is taking a different approach, one that caters to curiosity more than control.
Their new camera system doesn't ask you to define narrative paths, it simply allows you to 'look' beyond the edge of the frame. Imagine you're watching moving footage from a concert or sporting event, and you're able to look in any direction, peering into the crowd to see who's behind you or up into the air to watch halftime fireworks. No more 4:3 or 16:9 frames. No more boundaries. This is QTVR on steroids.
What you see in the sample above was not recored as actual video. It was captured as a sequence of photos, then stitched together to be played back as video.
"What we basically have done is we've bought the camera used for Google Street View ... and enabled it to capture 25 photos per second," explains Marc Groothelm, yellowBird's Managing Director. "And we've developed a protocol for how to bring it into any normal nonlinear editing software. That then allows us to show it online for the interactive experience."
Capturing this kind of footage is no small task either. A cameraperson must be rigged with close to 45 pounds of gear, including two backpacks (configured front and back) to hold batteries and laptop, with camera mounted above head, and surround sound microphone at the rear.
"The person wearing the camera determines what the experience will be, because the walking path will eventually become the interactive experience itself," Groothelm continues. "Observers around it have no idea what the camera is. And the cameraperson has to be completely silent so the mic doesn't pic up their voice. It can be a problem [at events] when people are asking him, 'Hey man, what are you doing?' He has to ignore it. The shots can be completely ruined with people chatting about what's going on."
Even with blown audio, yellowBird can fix it. Theirs is purely a service model. You hire the company to shoot, to edit, to do post - including any required audio cleanup - and to host in conjunction with Jet-Stream (although the hosting can be done by clients themselves).
Once it's ready for output, the video is made available through the yellowBird player, which uses Adobe Flash technology to allow individual users to simultaneously select different viewing directions.
"The viewer becomes the director, who can choose what he wants to see from his position," says co-founder Rafaël Redczus. "Nearly everyone has a powerful computer in combination with a broadband connection ... Flash is now standard on every computer [with] optimum support for online film and interactive 3-D functionality."
For more traditional mediums and distribution though, yellowBird may prove difficult to utilize. Movies have key grips, boom mics, and cappuccino fetching assistants, all carefully placed just out of frame so as to maintain the cinematic illusion. For 360 degrees of screen, creating seamless lighting alone may render it cost prohibitive.
Rather, yellowBird seems to lend itself to live events and experimental stuff, and Groothelm confirms that they are in discussions to record a music video for a British pop band, to create an alternative 360 degree experience. Beyond that, he sees the natural fit with online marketing.
"We want to expand on this technology so we will be able to create hotspots and make it more interactive than it is currently ... You can look around, but there is so much more to this concept," states Groothelm. "For example, if you think about shopping online, imagine moving through a store [using yellowBird video] and then click on certain items in the video, to see all the information appear within the movie. It's quite amazing and we hope to make it available this year. It could be a major development for online marketing."
