1. Oculus Rift[]
If you're not familiar with Oculus, they're a company working towards releasing a VR headset for computers. Though a consumer version is still probably a year away, they have released a dev kit version which game developers and impatient enthusiasts willing to put up with a buggy experience an check out. I'm one of the second group and have a Rift DK2.
2. Space Venus[]
Space Venus is a Morning Musume game of sorts released for PlayStation 2 in 2001. Among other things it includes an interactive video of Dance Suru no Da!, recorded with the members around a central set of cameras. The viewer can then change which direction they're looking with the analog stick. Search YouTube for Dance Suru no Da! and you'll find various versions of this, including in original format (where the whole scene is stored as strips on the top and bottom of the frame) and various edits where people have tried to make a decently viewable noninteractive version.
3. Putting it Together[]
Original video frame
Same frame after processing
One program I've tried with the DK2 is called Live View Rift, and is simply a video player with many options. You can view a video as if it's on a large screen in front of you. You can make the screen curved. You can even treat the video as if it's a cylinder completely surrounding you. So I had the thought that if I could get a properly formatted version of the Dance Suru no Da! video, a person could view it with the Rift and just look around at the video on a cylinder all around them instead of it being controled by an analog stick.
I downloaded a version of the video with the two halves showing on top and bottom, a 480x360 video file. I then had to search for a way to rearrange the video into its proper wider version. This ended up done with AviSynth, and resulted in a 960x180 video file.
4. Results[]
Checking out Nakazawa's close-up
Far from perfect, but still pretty damn cool.
The video is pretty low resolution, and grabbing it from YouTube necessarily means there's some extra compression going on to lower image quality further. I do have a copy of Space Venus; maybe if I can learn how to rip the video directly I can get a little improvement.
Also somehow the process of converting it to one really wide video makes the video slow down and stutter in some places--not sure yet why.
BUT in general it works as expected. Giant 360° Morning Musume video surrounding on all sides.
Bonus image: Here I was messing with the view options and ended up zooming the cylinder view to such an extent that rather than looking around from the inside, I was able to look at it from the outside!
Too far out!