Stop-Motion Animation: Now, in Virtual Reality

Stop-motion animation has been indoctrinated into the realm of virtual reality, courtesy of the team at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). In this new VR world, artists can simply drop animated models into a virtual environment. By rendering the models in real-time and capturing each in a ring of 360 images, the software maintains all of the characters’ geometric details and surface properties.

Watch real people enter virtual reality in The Creators Project’s documentary, Hollywood’s Digital Humans:

Viewers’ movements and hand gestures dictate the display as they experience the menagerie of hand-crafted puppets in “near-field VR”—an intimate adaptation which allows for interaction and close-inspection. With an adjustment to the VR’s parameters and dimensions, the environment additionally compresses for restricted locale, such as a living room or a kitchen. While the system is still in-development, the institute’s advent bodes well for the future of interactive animation.

Below, check out ICT’s cast of stop-motion characters and the video behind the process. 

See more experiments in virtual worlds on ICT’s website. 

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