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Music

Fly Around Toronto in Virtual Reality for Kevin Drew and Andy Kim's Cool Video "Who Came First"

This might be one of the cooler videos we've gotten to premiere.

The Oculus Rift officially launched this year, and while its advances in virtual reality gaming have been focused on, its capabilities to explore the music video format have been pretty much unheralded, probably because that would be kind of freaky. Nonetheless, longtime musical partners Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene and soon to be Canadian Hall of Fame inductee and music legend Andy Kim have created a VR clip for their song "Who Came First". Produced in conjunction with Occupied VR and directed by Grandson & Son, the video "installation" was viewed by the attendees of Toronto's Field Trip festival last summer. The 360-degree video still more or less works as an immersive experience even without a VR headset as it zooms through the Fort York grounds and into a cloudy alternate dimension where Drew and Kim are performing. The video will also be featured in the immersive 360 app Samsung Milk VR.

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"We filmed a month ahead of the Field Trip festival on the Ft. York grounds, in the exact place the VR users would be standing," said Grandson & Son. "The hope would be that when the user put the headset on, all the people would disappear and they’d be standing alone. He then built a special 360 camera rig and attached it to a drone and flew it up over the city. The user would feel like they’re floating up off the ground. It turned out really well."

Watch the video below.

Phil Witmer sometimes fears for the day we truly enter the Wired. Follow him on Twitter.