So far a third and final case study of real life scenarios on how VR and visual effects collide and what cannon hand we have. The Oculus story studio, formed almost after Facebook bought Oculus back in 2014 here in California and founded by a team of Pixar animators and veterans. Now again, this is just my personal experience and story of having witnessed its opening launch and growth since Facebook's Oculus acquisition in 2014. I've not worked there before and neither do I know anyone that directly So anyway, how does story studio combine VR and visual effects together? Well, as touched upon briefly in our previous lessons, story studios, tentpole project was Emmy Award winning Henry, technically the second animated shot ever created. We'll dive into that project in terms of what and how the project developed.

So The cool thing about the Henry is that it is not only full CG animation, but also has interactive components within the experience itself. Now they talked a bit about how they created Henry at SIGGRAPH 2015. And one of the reasons why Henry made waves at a time in VR in this case is because of its ability to establish a sense of presence for a user a sense of presence being one of the hotly debated topics in VR, when it comes to user experience sort of discussion of having a fake human body in there to integrating trackable hands, and so on and so forth. And this phenomenon of establishing sense of presence is actually very similar to visual effects, where our job is to be able to assist in the suspension of disbelief, and not have our visual effects be that obvious to the movie goer.

Not to mention that Pixar esque execution and lack of technical flaws and errors at first glance made Henry stand out in the world. Defend tainment vr at a time. Now, to everyone's surprise, and this came as a surprise to me to hear the big reveal. Story studio has actually been shut down since May 2017. Yes, I know. Shocking, right?

I mean, they won an Emmy for tadpole sake. Why? Well, perhaps Facebook wanted to reallocate resources or shift some personnel around. But again, we will never truly know. Unless your Facebook, then oh, yeah, you would know. My guess is that Oculus was simply trying to focus on the platform and hardware side of VR, and let other studios create the content.

But again, just another guest from me and I could be wrong. Now, most of the studios original team had either went on to form their own studios, or had been reallocated to other parts of the Oculus team. But even so, you can still see that their work still live on The Oculus stars to do original site, just because their works really had made them marks in the minds of many when it comes to high quality full CG VR shots, not endorsing their work. But as usual, and as with all the brands and companies I've discussed in this entire course, you can check out the rest of their works in their website link attached. So, in summary, story studio combines VR with visual effects by keeping true to the original tune and purpose of visual effects that is telling the story and ensuring that the technical aspects of visual effects and by extension VR remain as much in the background as possible in order to suspend disbelief and sell the story or in the case of Yeah, this sense of presence and an alternate reality.

Because in the end, good stories executed well will always live on, even if the studio disappears and is gone. Hey, Right. So, on that note, we have made it to the end of our final case study. Now, here comes the fun part. I want you to find your own project or studio to analyze the way I did. additional instructions are attached in the next assignment lecture.

And don't worry, if you're lost and don't know what to do, you can always post your questions on the q&a board. So what do you think about why analyses? Interesting makes sense? Just plain where the random also post and share those thoughts and opinions about these three case studies on the q&a board? Well, I look forward to seeing your own case studies and understanding how your awesome human mind works.