Jaunt, the virtual reality production house, is taking a major leap forward in the immersive media arms race by announcing a brand new, cloud based service to facilitate user generated content. “Jaunt Publishing,” will allow anyone, anywhere to quickly and easily submit their very own VR film or project for consideration onto the Jaunt platform.
Budding VR filmmakers can upload their creations through an online portal on the Jaunt website. In order to prevent trolling, however, a company release states that all projects will have to pass through an “internal review board” before going live on the platform. In this way, it offers a more strict curation system than something like standard YouTube.
There will also be certain formatting requirements for the films due to the specific nature of VR. Stereoscopic videos need to be in a 3840 x 3840 x 4096 x 4096 left eye over right eye format. Monoscopic videos will need to be 3840 x 1920 or 4096 x 2048. Submitted videos must also use square pixels, be in MP4 or h.264 encoding and have a minimum bitrate of 40 mbit. Audio files need to be 48 khz and Jaunt Publishing will enable spatial audio support for popular tools such as Dolby Atmos.
Powering this new publishing portal will be the freshly minted Jaunt Cloud Services (JCS). JCS will be responsible for “transcoding” user submitted videos — i.e. automatically converting a single submitted file into a usable format for each and every VR device currently on the market.
Different headsets use different video formats. The same video file will not play correctly on both an Oculus Rift and a Google Cardboard. The daunting prospect of transcoding a myriad of possible formats has therefore had a major chilling effect on any potential user-generated VR content community. The ability to submit content to a single portal and have it playable, seamlessly, across all devices, is an extremely enticing prospect for VR creators.
By streamlining the transcoding process and providing a single central hub for content to be sourced, Jaunt is making a clear play to become the go-to source for user created VR video content. YouTube created a revolution of amateur filmmakers, cell phone cinematographers, and webcam celebrities. While Google’s video giant can host 360-videos, accessing those videos on all of your VR devices easily isn’t that simple yet.
If Jaunt Publishing can further carve out its niche in the VR community, then the world of immersive 360-degree videos may be in for a similar renaissance as well.
