- by Lux
The fourth wall is a concept in traditional film and theatre which is essentially the boundary between the performers and the audience.
While there are exceptions, like theatre in the round, in most styles of theatre the audience is looking at the performance from the front of the stage. This is also known as a proscenium, in theatre lingo. In film, this would be the camera itself.
Breaking the fourth wall happens when an actor deliberately addresses the audience, speaking directly to them, or speaking directly into the camera. This was popularized in television shows like BBC's The Office, where actors would turn and look at the camera as if conferring with the audience that something absurd just happened. This can be used as a way to increase engagement with the audience, add emotional impact, create a memorable moment in the experience, and even make the audience feel like part of the show. |
In immersive theatre, there's no obvious fourth wall, yet there's still an audience whose perspective needs to be managed throughout the performance.
Some virtual worlds have obvious fourth walls because they mimic real-world theatres or stages. Flipside has a number of these, from the black box theatre, comedy club, outdoor stages, or our newest Laughs N' Riffs stage. In these cases, it's obvious where the audience will be and that the actors should make sure to craft the experience for that perspective.
Others, like our kitchen, class room, or campfire sets have no obvious fourth wall, but one must still to be added to the environment so that performers will know where the audience is expected to be.
An added question to be asked in crafting an immersive experience is whether the audience is participating in the story or simply watching, and whether this can be used to increase the sense of immersion or potentially take away from it.
In immersive worlds, audience comfort is also a factor to consider. Some audience members may not be comfortable having to engage, just like they may not want to sit in the front row of a stand-up comedy show for fear of becoming part of the show.
All these considerations are important in deciding how you want to craft a piece of immersive entertainment.
In immersive entertainment, there are two ends to the spectrum of breaking the fourth wall:
Between these ends are other approaches such as giving a knowing nod to the audience but not engaging verbally, and many other ways we have yet to dream up. Immersive performance is a ripe ground for innovation.
There are also examples of breaking the fourth wall for specific purposes, such as:
We think a lot about the fourth wall in Flipside. Our team has many discussions and plans for evolving the audience's perspective and experience. We look forward to exploring this subject with Flipside's community of creators as Flipside continues to evolve.
Today, when you load a set to record a post, Flipside shows an "Audience" marker where the audience members will spawn when loading the post to watch. This is the first step to something more full-featured that we're working on fleshing out in a variety of ways, such as:
One key challenge to overcome with moving the audience between positions or giving them vehicular controls is simulator sickness. While we already have features like vignetting of the user's POV when walking around in Flipside or rotating the world while invisible, this needs to be considered in any implementation of audience movement as well. For example, preventing the rails experience from tilting the audience position while moving it between point A and point B, but only allowing the creator to adjust the yaw but not the roll or pitch.
There's also the challenge of watching content in mixed reality versus fully immersive virtual reality. The audience in this case may often be arranged more like the audience in theatre in the round except the content would likely need to be scaled to fit the room instead of being life sized, and the same piece of content in Flipside may end up being viewed in both of those contexts.
Another consideration for non-headset-wearing audiences and how we might enable audience members to become avatars within the content or whether we enable them to drop and control virtual cameras in the scene so they can feel like the director of the show.
Each of these is a powerful way to engage audiences and ultimately, our job is to empower creators to craft the experience for all audiences in such a way that makes for a great experience for each of them. It's a tall order, but we've got more than a few tricks up our sleeves that we'll be introducing over time.
- by Lux
By Lux (Flipside's CEO & Co-Founder)
There's an interesting effect in technology where platforms align themselves with certain terminology in order to try to differentiate from one another. But eventually, most companies converge on common words. Web 2.0, web3, cloud computing, edge computing, the list goes on.
In virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), these terms were coined long before the technology was ready for an industry to form around them. Then came the Oculus Rift which was dubbed a VR headset. But it could have just as easily been called a VR visor, or the more technical head-mounted display (HMD) that people sometimes use.
Then Microsoft came along and coined mixed reality (despite the fact that mixed reality meant something already) and branded their VR platform Windows MR. Other companies tried to coin a term that would encompass both AR and VR and came up with XR, as in extended reality.
Now Apple has entered the fray with the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) and is calling it a spatial computing device. They even go so far as to discourage app developers from referring to either AR or VR when describing their AVP apps.
Windows MR has since been abandoned, and many companies continue to use XR, but the influence Apple has on shaping industry perception is massive, so my prediction is that we'll all eventually converge around spatial computing, unless they pivot to something else.
But when talking about VR experiences, the word spatial leaves something to be desired. While yes, it does suggest a blend of both AR and VR, there's another word that I think might be lost in the shuffle: Immersive.
You see, spatial refers to the three-dimensionality of what's displayed, but immersive refers to the sensory experience of the user. One is technology-centric and the other is user-centric. Which is why you don't hear about spatial theatre groups, but you do hear about immersive theatre groups, and when users describe an experience they just had, they don't say how spatial it was, they say they felt immersed in it.
This split makes me think of Simon Sinek's TED talk about how people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. The word immersive touches on a why. Spatial just describes a piece of technology. Which is odd for Apple, who are the original company to say ay ahere's to the crazy onesss in their Think Different campaign.
Immersive speaks to one of the values of the experience the user has, and the implied belief that immersion offers something to the user experience that non-immersive content can't offer.
But we usually think of immersion as a VR thing, and not an AR thing. I think there are degrees of immersion, and AR still meets several of them. When you lose yourself in the experience, that's immersion, whether you can see the edges or a peek of the man behind the curtain.
In AR terms, this immersion can range from creating the effect that there are portals you can peer through in your room's physical walls, or the effect of of oskinningss your reality. Imagine an AR skin that makes your world look like Sin City, or The Walking Dead - that would surely be pretty immersive and yet is only augmenting your real world experience.
Projection mapping has become a common technique used by VJs to make stages and walls at festivals and raves feel more immersive, and a similar effect is employed by installations like the Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience. There are even immersive audio experiences like Darkfield Radio that immerse the user without using any visuals at all.
The key to immersion is helping the user get lost in the experience. When you lose yourself in something, you lose your sense of time, you forget about your outside cares, you take things in more fully, and you leave having had an experience that may have awed you or moved you in some way that you felt you were a part of. That's the magic of of ospatial computingutingu, not the technology.
- by Lux
It's been one year since we officially launched on the Meta Quest app store, and what a year it's been!
Our user base has grown to over 50,000 creators who've made over 160,000 spatial recordings. We're sincerely grateful for every one of our users as well as the positive reviews and messages of encouragement you've sent us. Those words and the content you're making and sharing keep our team motivated every day to make Flipside the best we can make it, so thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Here are some of the highlights we've had over the past year:
Since launch, we've released 14 software updates, including some major new features including:
We've substantially expanded the list of built-in characters, props, and sets to now include hundreds of options.
We launched with a library of 55 characters, 49 sets, and 330 props. We now have 111 characters, 69 sets, and too many props to count.
And of course, you can always create custom characters through our Ready Player Me integration, custom sets with our Blockade Labs integration, or use our Flipside Creator Tools plugin for Unity to import your own custom characters, sets, and props. Sky's the limit!
We've expanded beyond the Meta app stores to include support for Pico 4 headsets too.
We've changed the name of our app from Flipside Studio to simply Flipside, emphasizing that Flipside is now a metaverse social media platform for next-gen creators to be able to share their spatial recordings directly with their fans.
Our vision is to build a metaverse powered by imagination, and to democratize the creation of spatial and immersive content so that anyone with an idea can bring that idea to life and share it with the world.
We believe this is the missing piece of the metaverse, enabling real-time content creation so that you just act things out and they're instantly ready to share.
Read more about this new direction here
As more and more creators publish to Flipside, we want to highlight some of our favourites here for you.
- by Lux
By Lux (Flipside's CEO & Co-Founder)
What if you were to combine social media with a virtual TV studio? The results would be a social media platform focused on pure imagination and hyper creativity. Sounds crazy, but it makes total sense in the metaverse.
And that is exactly what Flipside is, the first social media platform built on a foundation of pure imagination. You can think of it as the TikTok of immersive entertainment, or like stepping inside of a content creator’s mind.
Because the thinking that’s gone into existing metaverses is too limited to the original vision of what a metaverse is, which makes great fodder for science fiction, but isn’t a complete vision of what that could look like. It’s missing real-time content creation at the heart of it all, which is exactly where Flipside comes in.
Spatial computing empowers a level of real-time content creation never seen before. Instead of animating frame by frame, or building interactivity in a game engine, now you just become a character on a virtual set, and your words and movements become the performance. When you press save, the recording is done. That fast.
We’re seeing the emergence of what we call next-gen creators. Creators who are XR native and spatial first. Who feel perfectly themselves embodying an avatar and who understand that identity is something that can shift and morph even from moment to moment. Who step through virtual worlds as fluidly as stepping through a door. The inventors and discoverers of what’s possible in this new spatial computing paradigm.
And we know audiences have been dreaming of the idea of being able to jump inside of the content they’re seeing, from Mary Poppins and gang jumping inside of a chalk drawing, or Alice falling down the rabbit hole long before that.
So here’s our tribute to next-gen creators and their fans. We’ll be there watching your creations and celebrating the vision you bring to the birth of a new space for imagination and endless creativity.
Welcome to Flipside.
- by Lux
We’ve come a long way from being a virtual TV studio for spatial content creation. Today we’re announcing Flipside Studio is now simply called Flipside.
With creator channels and social sharing features built right in, Flipside is now a full-blown metaverse social media platform where next-gen creators can post their spatial recordings to their channels to share with their fans.
To be clear, all of the Flipside Studio features like our camera switcher are sticking around. Flipside will always excel at producing 2D content for cross-promotion on other platforms, but our vision is to help creators build a following that can interact directly with their spatial and immersive content.
Tokens are the virtual currency of Flipside. They provide a way to pay for virtual goods or premium features, but more importantly, they provide a way for creators to generate revenue from their Flipside content.
Our mission is to help creators build sustainable channels where they can earn real money from their content. That’s why we’re introducing creator payouts from day 1 in our token system. When you reach the payout threshold, visit the Flipside Creator Portal and click on the Request Payout button. It’s that easy.
Tokens are currently limited to paying for our AI integrations and sending tips to your favourite channels, but we will be expanding the program to include many new ways for creators to earn tokens over time.
Click here to learn more about our Flipside token program
It's back-to-school time, and we know that instructors are getting geared up to provide future innovators with the skills they need to succeed. Are you an educator interested in using Flipside in the classroom? Join our educators' mailing list and let us know.
Thanks to everyone who notified us of bugs and shared feature requests! We love the ideas and appreciate when you share your feedback.
CLICK HERE TO FILE A BUG REPORT
We’d love to welcome you to the Flipside Studio Community Discord channel where you can connect with other creators, share your #MadeInFlipside creations, submit feature requests, and share bug reports.
Join the Community- by Lux
We're excited to finally take the wraps off of the new version of Flipside Studio, which includes a number of major improvements and new features.
This is also the first version of Flipside Studio to offer paid subscription plans for added functionality. All of the existing functionality of Flipside Studio remains free for everyone, but the watermark removal and some of the new features below will be paid-only.
Visit our pricing page to learn more.
Flipside Studio 2021.1 adds the ability to export motion capture data, making Flipside Studio the easiest way to record multiplayer motion capture sessions for use in any animation software or video game. Motion capture data can be exported in the following ways:
How it works is you record your characters with just your VR headset and controllers, and Flipside Studio exports the full-body character movements. If you have Vive Trackers, you can also do full-body motion capture!
Note: Motion capture data export is a paid feature.
Flipside Studio 2021.1 adds a powerful new video renderer for exporting footage of your Flipside Studio recordings.
Features include:
Note: The video renderer is a paid feature.
Retargeting is the process of converting an actor's movement to the shape and dimensions of the character. Flipside Studio's retargeting system was rewritten from scratch for 2021.1 and the result is a massive improvement to the way characters move.
In our old retargeting system, the larger the difference there was between the actor and the character's dimensions, the less natural their movement would feel. In the new system, actors still control characters just by moving their bodies, but the movement of the character is more true to the character's dimensions. This means the actor and character hands won't always line up, but what the cameras see will be more accurate and look better.
The new retargeting system should be applied automatically, but if your character's movements feel off, you may need to recalibrate to fix it.
We've added a new feature we call stand-ins which adds the ability to freeze your character poses so they can be used as stand-in references when setting up your shots, and as actor marks during your shoot. Point your teleporter at a stand-in and your teleporter will lock onto it. Teleport into it and you'll automatically teleport to your mark for the shoot and change into the right character too if you weren't already.
And just like Flipside's current actor mark props, you can move them to adjust their positions or remove them individually by grabbing them in Set Builder mode.
While this feature is experimental, you'll find it on the underside of the Characters palette under the Stand-Ins heading. Press the Pose button and you'll be given a 3-second countdown. At the end of the countdown, a stand-in will appear for each user who's in character at the time.
In addition to the new BVH to Unity animation converter that works alongside the new motion capture data export feature of Flipside Studio, we've also added the following new features to the Flipside Creator Tools:
This release introduces a new FaceMirror component that lets you animate faces on non-character objects in sets, such as props or otherwise inanimate objects.
We've included an example scene under FlipsideCreatorTools/Examples/Example-FaceMirror where you can see how it works and how it's setup. Just attach a FaceMirror to any object, then attach additional FacialExpressionReference components to power the elements of the disembodied face.
FaceMirror-powered faces work over multiplayer in Flipside Studio and can be recorded and played back complete with recorded voices.
We've added a new character expression type called AnimationParameters, which lets you control Unity animation parameters to achieve more sophisticated animated expressions.
You can now publish your custom characters and sets to Flipside Studio directly in Unity through a unified "Build & Publish" button in the Flipside Creator Tools window. This helps reduce iteration time and eliminates the need to hunt down your bundle files or open a separate browser window, enabling one-click publishing. Just reload the character or set in Flipside Studio to see your changes instantly in VR.
Click here to download the latest version of the Flipside Creator Tools 2021.1.
- by Lux
Today we are celebrating the launch of Flipside Studio 2020.1, along with a completely updated brand and website refresh.
With over 32,000 recordings, a 48-episode comedy show produced live by Caffeine Studios, and a kid's show streaming on Super RTL, the largest private broadcaster in Germany, all made with Flipside Studio, we couldn't be more excited to be rolling out tons of new features and seeing what our users will create with them.
Flipside Studio now supports not only one type of multiplayer, but two (is that another first in VR?!). Now you can choose the best type of connection for your productions.
Here's a handy reference to help you choose:
We've added the ability to add physics colliders on characters so that their interactions with the environment feel more realistic. You can generate colliders for a character in the Flipside Creator Tools with a single click, and then tweak them to suit your needs.
Note that body physics can be very performance intensive, so we recommend going through the generated colliders and removing ones that aren't necessary to achieve the shots you need. Often you can get away with just a collider or two on the arms and midsection of the body, but it can scale all the way up to individual fingers if needed.
We've added a new facial expression mode that lets you add blinking and expressions to texture-based faces, which lets your characters have more expressiveness while recreating that classic cartoon style. You can also mix and match styles now too, so part of your face can be animated with textures and another can be animated with blend shapes or even Unity animations. The possibilities are pretty much endless.
Flipside Studio can now appear as a virtual camera device that apps like Zoom, Skype, etc. can use as your video source. To enable it, go to Settings > Output on the desktop camera switcher interface and look for the DirectShow settings.
The teleprompter controller has been revamped to include auto-scrolling with a slider to adjust the scroll speed.
We've made a number of improvements to how eyes move on characters in Flipside Studio, including improved idle movement with simulated saccades and world-space points of interest, more natural blinking, and improved range of motion when eyes lock onto targets of interest.
We've added a TwitchActions component to the Flipside Creator Tools that lets you define custom Twitch chat commands that users can type which then trigger actions in your custom sets. This can be used for anything from triggering sounds and visual effects to voting on the direction the show's narrative should take.
We've added a ton of new interactive functionality to the Flipside Creator Tools, letting you build sets with interactions as complex as games. There's even a scoreboard element that keeps score for everyone in the scene.
Build your own guns (or pea-shooters!), choose-your-own-adventure stories, and more with over a dozen new components. The best part is you can hit Play in Unity and test them all in VR without having to build and upload your sets, making the Flipside Creator Tools a very powerful tool for crafting interactive VR experiences.
We've added support for an unlimited number of camaras in the VR camera switcher, which is now found under the Show Tools menu, and you can have as many VR camera switchers as you need too.
We've increased the recorded and multiplayer audio quality in Flipside Studio from 16 kHz (the standard for VoIP) to 24 kHz, which noticeably improves the voice quality particularly in frequencies between 8-12 kHz. We did this while also improving our audio playback performance!
With this release, we have now completed our upgrade from Unity 2017 to 2019, meaning all assets should be made using Unity 2019 from now on. This was our first major Unity upgrade since supporting user-uploaded assets and taught us a lot about how to migrate successfully when users also have to update their assets.
If you're still making assets in Unity 2017, now's the time to head over to the Flipside Creator Tools page to find the new version of Unity to use and update those assets! We've done a lot to make it backwards compatible with 2017 assets, but some compatibility issues couldn't be solved automatically.
Flipside Studio
Flipside Creator Tools
Flipside Studio 2020.1 is now the current stable release on Oculus Home and SteamVR, so those of you on the Beta channel that don't want the latest experimental features can access this release on the regular Stable channel now. We will be introducing a new beta with some exciting new features in the next few weeks, so feel free to stick to the Beta channel if you're interested in testing those out.
If you make your own custom characters and sets, you will also need to upgrade to the Flipside Creator Tools 2020.1, which can be downloaded from here.
From the Flipside XR team, we want to say a big thanks to all of our users who have helped shape this release by testing and and finding bugs for us to fix. You've all helped make Flipside what it is today.
Sincerely,
Team Flipside
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
Click here to download the release candidate of the Flipside Creator Tools (2020.1.0-rc2).
With this update, we're also moving to a new calendar versioning-based version numbering system, which is described in more detail here.
This release of both Flipside Studio and Flipside Creator Tools now share the version 2020.1.0-rc2.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
We're excited to announce that today's release on the Flipside Studio beta release channel is our first release candidate for a new stable version of Flipside Studio.
What this means is we're holding off on any major new features to focus on fixes and usability improvements until we feel it's ready to move over to the stable channel for everyone to use. If there are no major issues with this release, we'll move it over (along with any fixes we make in the meantime) to the stable channel after a couple weeks of general use.
Once we go stable, it will also complete our migration from Unity 2017 to 2019, so now's the time to update any assets that haven't been updated to Unity 2019 yet.
Click here to download the release candidate of the Flipside Creator Tools (2020.1.0-rc1).
With this update, we're also moving to a new calendar versioning-based version numbering system, which is described in more detail here.
This release of both Flipside Studio and Flipside Creator Tools now share the version 2020.1.0-rc1.
- by Lux
Please note: This update includes some big changes which we wanted to give everyone time to test out safely and adapt to their projects, so to try it out you'll need to opt into our Beta release channel. Instructions on switching between release channels can be found here.
We've added a plugin that creates a "Flipside Studio" virtual camera device in Windows, so you can select Flipside in your camera list in any video chat software, including Zoom, Skype, Slack, Whereby, etc.
To turn the virtual camera device on, press Alt+D in Flipside Studio. The first time you do, Windows will popup up a notice requesting administrative permission to install the virtual camera device. Give it permission and you should see "Flipside Studio" in your camera options the next time you launch your video chat software of choice.
Note: If you don't see "Flipside Studio" in your camera options, you may need to restart Windows for the change to take effect.
Also note that you will need to press Alt+D to enable the virtual camera each time you run Flipside Studio while this feature is still considered experimental and not enabled by default.
Click here to download the latest version of the Flipside Creator Tools beta (v0.33).
Duplicating the scene file for a character or set can lead to issues building bundles because Unity gets confused when more than one scene file has the same asset bundle label.
To make this less error-prone, we've added a new Duplicate Selected Scene menu option under the Flipside Creator Tools menu which duplicates the scene and also changes the asset bundle label at the same time, making it easy now to create alternate versions of characters and sets for testing.