AltspaceVR offers a wide variety of content for its global userbase, but live events hosted in America aren’t convenient for people on the other side of the globe. For example, a 9pm show in LA is an early 5am show for people in London. If AltspaceVR wants to attract audiences from around the globe for its special events, it needs a way to make them available to people in dramatically different time zones.
The company’s answer to that problem is a new feature called VR Capture, which allows AltspaceVR to record VR performances and make them available at scheduled times in the future.
“VR Capture is an important breakthrough for the development and growth of VR as a medium,” said Eric Romo, CEO, AltspaceVR. “Being able to capture and playback anything that happens in AltspaceVR will encourage artists, creators, and performers to leverage their talents and better satisfy a growing VR market that is hungry for content.”
VR Capture is different from traditional recording methods. Instead of a 2D video capture of the event space, VR Capture records a performer’s movements, voice, and music (if there is any) to be played back at another time for a different audience. AltspaceVR also captures the emoji reactions from the original crowd, but the company doesn’t capture audience avatars.
AltspaceVR CEO Eric Romo gave use two reasons that VR Capture doesn’t record the crowd avatars. First, AltspaceVR doesn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable about having their actions and speech recorded--especially for performances that took place before the company revealed VR Capture. Also, capturing the crowd would be counterintuitive to what AltspaceVR is trying to achieve.
VR Capture events aren’t strictly replays. Though the performance is no longer live, replays through AltspaceVR with VR Capture are meant to feel like another live event. The company isn’t going for a Netflix-like on-demand replay system. Instead, the company is using VR Capture to offer scheduled replay events so that you can experience event replays and share them with a live crowd.
As part of the launch of VR Capture technology, AltspaceVR is hosting a marathon of recent events. If you missed out on the special events that AltspaceVR recently hosted, now’s your chance to catch the replay. Those events include appearances by comedic musician Reggie Watts; Justin Roiland, the voice and co-creator of Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty; and Drew Carrey, the host of The Price Is Right. Rikard Steiber, president of Viveport, also did a Q&A in AltspaceVR recently, which you can catch during the marathon.
The AltspaceVR replay marathon kicks off at 11am PST with the Reggie Watts and Justin Roiland event, followed by another replay presentation every hour for most of the day. Going forward, AltspaceVR plans to schedule replay events so that people from all time zones can participate.
