FULL CONTACT Sparring in VR

Holy shit that turned out amazing.

I honestly had my doubts about this considering:

• I don’t have a gimbal or any type of hardware stabilization (like a glidecam rig)
• I’ve attempted something like this before with just a view of a person walking, but ultimately failed
• There was so much movement during the sparring session
• Everything I did in this video are things all the “experts” tell you not to do with VR video (moving the camera, walking with the cam, no stabilization, etc).

Despite all this, none of it mattered, cause this video fucking SLAPS if I do say so myself. While shooting, I had a few things working in my favor:

1. I had my smartphone connected to my vuze xr, so I was able to monitor the framing the entire time
2. Because both the Vuze XR and the phone are light, I was never fatigued while holding the rig
3. Because I’m familiar with boxing/sparring, I knew how to follow the subjects and to give them space
4. I had bubble levelers to show me how stable my camera was at all times

In the photo above, you can see how my monopod was rigged. By having a pole instead of, say, a cage with a couple of handles, I was granted additional height so I could keep my camera at eye-level with the subjects, as they’re both much taller than me. This kept them in a great perspective, and the motion I did was slow enough (for the most part) that I made sure I wasn’t giving the viewer any whiplash moments. But the saving grace of the whole video is this:

The action is so captivating that they serve as a natural visual anchor, which helps tunnel-vision the viewer and makes camera motion more bearable.

I had tinkered around with this idea before; using a person as a visual anchor to help focus the viewer’s attention and dampen motion sickness. I got the idea from third-person, over-the-shoulder POV video games like GTA, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc. In these games, there may be moments of intense camera movement, but because your character is dead center in the screen, visual motion doesn’t seem to affect the viewer as much as first-person POV games do. I got a handful of friends that simply can’t play Skyrim or Fallout because of the POV, but can go all night riding horses & skinning armadillos in Red Dead Redemption 2 simply cause of the shift of POV.

But the times that I’ve tried recording VR180 “over the shoulder” walking footage, there was just too much for the eye to wander around and look at, that the subject that’s in the middle of the frame did a poor job as serving as a visual anchor. I was mainly hoping this would work so that I wouldn’t have to buy a wildly expensive active gimbal system to do walking-shots, and I also didn’t wanna look like a dorky tourist/an easy lick. 

But the difference in the sparring video is that the action IS perhaps the only interesting thing to see in frame. The rest of the frame is just a plain looking gym. Justin and Ian were having the best round of sparring that we captured that afternoon, and it was action-packed from beginning to end. It was the action and the experience that pulled the viewer’s focus and attention, and I think it succeeded well to help with the intense VR camera motion. 

True though that if you don’t have any “VR legs,” the sparring video may be a bit too much still. But even my wife who doesn’t have VR legs neither, could at least stomach the first half of the video. And she could attest to how immersive and action packed the video was as well. With stabilization hardware, this can only get better and better.

“This is the most cinematic fight I’ve ever seen”
~ Justin Hewlett-Bloch

But what was most exciting about this video was the reaction that both Ian and Justin had while watching the in-ring sparring footage. As long-time boxing practitioners, they both agreed that this was easily the most immersive and “accurate” way of viewing a fight. They pointed out and praised things I hadn’t thought of: the fact that you could see the entire body meant that you can scrutinize footwork, head movement, body position, etc, in ways that a traditional 2D video can’t capture. When I asked about the “bowtie camera” that refs wear, which feature wide-angled views, Justin mentioned that because it’s a fish-eye, everything’s warped and harder to see, unlike in the VR180 video where everything is at-perspective as it should be.

They even mentioned that this should be a service I can shop around to professional fighters looking to get a better critique of their fighting style for training purposes. I mean, I don’t know if that’s all I’d wanna shoot as an XR videographer, but it’s very promising that they had that much confidence in what they were watching. It’s been inspiring to hear their excitement about it.

So what now?

Well, I def would like to try this again, but with a better camera and some hardware stabilization. I can’t imagine any fight league allowing a camera man to hop in the ring during a live fight, but… wouldn’t that be so cool? At the very least, maybe recording sparring sessions would be the move. As for other applications, I think this video proved that so long as action is in the center of the frame, motion is permissible. Not only that, but this also further proves that VR/spatial video provides an unparalleled immersive viewing experience, so long as the content lends itself to experience-based viewing versus narrative-driven viewing. I’ve been reading the book “Hyper-Reality” lately and it’s been eye-opening as to what makes for good VR content, and it has me thinking about how it applies to immersive video as well. I’m glad this video hit a lot of the marks that I’ve been reading up on, and I’m hoping more ideas will reveal themselves soon.

Thanks for reading/watching, and till next time, stay immersed.

~ Kuya