Grips: Making Cameras Movable During a Performance

Imagine a show where your audience watches a projection of an experience in which you, as a performer in VR, make live adjustments. In such an experience, you might want to re-position objects like cameras or lights in the space to react to the music or audience. In this article, we'll look at grips to see how they can enable such a situation.

• Let's start with a fresh scene by clicking on File menu/New.

Next let's create an object in the space that will represent what we'll show to the audience. 

• From the toolbox panel, select 'entities' from the top list
• Select 'sphere' from the lower list
• Click and drag in the space to create a sphere

Next, let's create our gripable camera:

• Select 'cameras' from the top list of the toolbox panel
• Click 'camera to display' from the lower list
• Click in the space to place a camera (a Display will also get created)
• Next, click 'live tools' from the top list of the toolbox panel
• Click 'add grip' from the lower list
• Click the camera you created in the space. The grip is added to the camera

Lastly, let's create our VR entry point:

• Click on 'vr \ ar' from the top list of the toolbox panel
• Click on 'vr rig (preset)' from the bottom list
• Click in the space to create the VR rig
• Right-click to exit draw mode

We now have a camera that, when we press play, we'll be able to grab with a VR hand controller by pointing the laser at the grip and holding down the interact button. Now all we need to do is setup an output for the camera's Display that will broadcast to our audience.

• From the Edit menu, click Preferences...
• Click the 'outputs' tab at the bottom of the preferences panel
• From the left list, select Camera Display
• Next, click the + button on the bottom-right of the Display Outputs list
• Choose an output to render to:
  • New Screen Display Output: will output to a second display (multi-monitor setup)
  • New VR Device Display Output: will output to a connect VR device. This will allow a user to view in VR what you are doing on screen.
  • New Spout Display Output: will output to an external local application via the Spout protocol
  • New NewTek NDI Display Output: will output via NDI to other applications on the network
  • New Rendered Video Display Output: will render the output to a video file when you click Play.
• When you've chosen an output, click OK to close the preferences window

Now when we enter VR mode (by clicking the VR button at the top right of the screen) and we click the VR-Present button (located to the right of the Stop button at the bottom right of the screen) we'll be able to use the VR hand controller to grab the camera and move it around, dictating what our audience can see.

We can also attach grips to other objects such as lights, sounds and emitters as well.