So, now that you know almost all the nooks and crannies of the VR stratosphere, let's talk about how VR ties in with the visual effects industry in general, beginning with a brief flashback into the humble beginnings of VR. So, VR has actually existed or attempted to exist since a long time ago back in the 1960s and 1970s, where a fella by the name of Ivan Sutherland, with his student, Bob Sproul, created what appeared to be the first HMD for immersive application. Now, I wouldn't say immersive experiences because look at this right here. Yeah, not really too pretty to put on. Anyway. It didn't work out so well VR as a whole.

So the technology was mainly constrained to medical, military training, and industrial design industries and applications rather than entertainment which still needed work regarding Less. Now, Flash forward to recent years ever since Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion back in 2014. The visual effects industry has been paying attention to it because to be frank visual effects jobs and work has been going downhill for a while, at least in the USA, since the whole big shebang with the Life of Pi. I'm not going to go into detail in this lecture because I talk more about this in my TEDx talk here. So the advent of VR was perfect timing for the visual effects industry to pick up on VR since it involves both the tech in apps which are very closely overlaps with visual effects, and apparently also the gaming industry, mainly due to the technical nature of our works.

Now, the question then boils down to how exactly does VR tie in with the art and science of creating visual effects? Well, in terms of the art side of things, it is all about achieving the most seemingly blending in or perfect imagery on screen, or in this case, on screens, whether it is cinematic VR or full CG Bo, as a visual effects artist has not changed in VR, where it is also our goal to ensure that users are not looking at image artifacts or things that appear fake. At the same time, we aim to do this in a cost effective way, just like in VR, where this becomes even more important because of the hardware limitations itself. And these as of the creation of this course, in visual effects, we have to watch our render times, especially when churning out shots quickly, and also aim to solve the shot as quickly as possible.

Using the most cost effective techniques is actually even more obvious in games, where it relies heavily on both CPU and GPU power to power a game. As you can already guess, VR has impacted visual effects artists and specialists working in film and TV all over the world and in the US, this has given rise to a new type of A project to work on namely, cinematic VR. Not only does this give rise to new jobs that has somewhat also revived the visual effects industry in recent years, as you can see in the statistics attached in the external article here, visual effects artists are now also expected to understand how to fix stitching errors and all that fancy schmancy we talked about in the earlier lessons, the lack of rendering power will also be another issue that needs to be solved, since the frame rates will now be increased from 30 to 60, or sometimes even 120 frames per second in order for the images to look like they are high definition and polished in VR.

That and the fact that a high definition VR usually requires a 4k and above resolution size anyway in order to even appear decent. So we follow this heat going around. You might be wondering, how exactly do I get involved with both VR and visual effects. Oh, maybe not. But anyway, one very simple answer starts from the visual effects side. First, it is much easier to get involved in both VR and visual effects by getting involved in the traditional visual effects route first, because in the end, the VR work is still just footage that needs to be enhanced or fixed in post.

So if you really think about it, it is still considered as typical visual effects work. Now, there are some caveats, but I will save that for my other course that dives deeper into this trend. For now, if you are still confused about VR, please post your thoughts or questions on the q&a board. Otherwise, let's wrap up this section and move on to real live case studies on certain VR companies, how they function and their future possibilities.