Warner Bros is building a holographic Batcave for the Oculus Rift
Like comic books? Then you're probably familiar with the style of Bruce Timm, the father of the DC animated universe -- a specific era (and style) of DC Comics animation projects that started with the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series. If you missed it, it was a fantastic series: Batman had an incredible voice, Robin didn't deal in cheesy catch phrases and Mark Hamill was the Joker. Seriously. Now, Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment is bringing Timm's vision of Batman back as an interactive holographic video designed for virtual reality displays: they're building an animated Batcave for the Oculus Rift.
Although Warner Bros' announcement focuses largely on the Batcave experience, the announcement is more than your run-of-the-mill VR demo - it's a testing ground for OTOY's holographic video technology. The technology was announced at SIGGRAPH earlier this year as a next-generation entertainment solution. The format is designed to allow 3D rendered spaces with dynamic lighting to be streamed through the internet, loaded on local machines or viewed through HTML5-capable web browsers. Particularly large demos will leverage cloud processing, too. It's still early for the technology, but the company hopes that it will be ready for the mass market in 2015, after there are more commercial VR headsets available to consumers.
In any case, the group is hard at work at recreating the Batcave, circa 1992 -- and has apparently conscripted Timm to ensure that every detail of the dark knight's underground lair is accurate to his original vision. Warner Bros. hasn't announced when the Batcave will be open for tours, but it should be available to users of the Oculus Rift and Samsung GALAXY VR. It's too early to say if OTOY's vision for holographic video will be a long term success, but at least its first commercial project sounds like fun.
