Okay, welcome to a first case study of real life scenarios on how VR and visual effects collide and work hand in hand. In this case study will dive deeper into the story behind within, aka versus a VR company and startup based in Los Angeles, California, USA. I've actually had personal experience with this company having worked there back in 2015 during the early days, so some of the information I will cover would be pretty in depth. So let's get to it. Firstly, we shall pose the question How does within combine VR and visual effects together, back then within was focused on documentaries and creating live action VR shorts. Now when I used to work there, I actually managed to work on a few titles, including, for example, the New York Times walking New York VR shot, as you can see, right here so let's dive into That a bit and talk about what and how that project was developed when I was involved.

Now their focus was on telling somebody's story in New York and part of a New York Times project. What I did was essentially back when the foundry did not have Cara vi at a time, fix their stereo seams and stitching errors on some of their shots. Three shots to be precise. Unfortunately, one day someone from the team called me after my contract ended, that they lost some of the original work files I did so they did not publish the revised version with my shots. But to my surprise, I happen to have some of those fix shots with me. Don't ask me how.

So here's a quick comparison. The changes I made to finesse this particular live action via shot was basically adjusting the different footage to match a correct the ghosting and distortion effect in between the seams between the different foot From the cameras, and also attempting to color correct the different brightness differences between stitch plates as well. In the case of this particular project, the visual effects and VR hybrid was cleaning up and solving the shot, similar to how one would work on a traditional 2d or 3d film shot. As you can see, what I had to do was essentially fix and use the existing tools I had at the time to solve those issues. Today, though, after some rebranding from verse to within, it would appear that today our focus is more on branching out beyond shots to other avenues of entertainment, such as music and animated works with more CG elements, even branching out to AR which back then they did not even focus on.

So even if that focus on live action has somewhat dwindled, in my opinion, the need for visual effects people are still consistent, just different types of visual effects people as you can see on that Jobs page, mainly engineers, and mobile apps. And that makes sense if we are talking about doing my er, and branching out to multiple platforms. Once again, I am not endorsing their work, nearly studying them, just like how you could study Microsoft or Apple and not endorse or be a brand ambassador for them, for example. Now, if you would like to check out more of their other projects, they do have their VR works shown on both VR devices, platforms, and even non VR platforms, like the web and on mobile apps. Woohoo. So if you found this entire lesson to be way too long, and you skip all the way to the end, no worries, because here is the overview.

So in summary, didn't combines VR with visual effects like any other typical visual effects studio does, at least from the get go. They were hiring visual effects artists to essentially Fixed live action via stitching of stereoscopic issues, creating 3d content. And then having that engineers do the programming and interactivity parts of their pieces, we can expect that within will continue to create their own content and work on client projects of similar caliber in VR. Personally, I've yet to see them create an AR project as of this recording, because their brand is so recognizable in VR, but who knows, maybe they'll do some AR someday, as they say they do in their bio page. Alrighty. Now, let's move on to the next case study on foreign VR startup signups