How to Solve the Big Hairy Problem in Virtual Reality?

Data storage is a big hairy word for most people. There are miles of content and very few platforms that help tie it all together seamlessly, especially in film, animation and virtual reality production.

When I’m working on films like The Wolf Of Wall Street and Star Wars, I deal with hundreds and hundreds of artists spread across the world. And I’m constantly faced with one question:

It’s can become a nightmare!

In haste, content creators gloss over the technical foundation necessary for the project at hand. Over time, they come to realize these manual ad hoc processes are resulting in costly mistakes, preventing them from scaling into a successful studio. Embracing new collaborative technologies is a great step forward, however, it’s prudent to look beyond some of the basic initial offerings out there that may not be catered to our data intensive industry.

As a media technology consultant, I’ve seen racks of hard drives as studios constrain themselves with local resources. And the mess it creates goes beyond desks. By using hard drives to store camera footage, creatives tend to split projects across multiple devices, making an internal mess of things. It wastes valuable time trying to locate that exact shot on drive 7b. Or, wait, was it drive 7a?

It’s essential for studios to obtain proper asset management. This makes it easier to track the whos, whats, and wheres, of keeping a file organized. Not to mention, limiting your resources to in-house infrastructure restricts the enormous processing VR requires. Collaborating on 360° Video means you are dealing with constant file conversions, stitching, color management and, the exporting of files to a publishing platform. Throw in the geometry files and textures of an interactive VR project, and you’ll find storage even further constrained.

There are many stories to be told, and VR presents a wonderful platform for telling compelling stories and affecting people across the world. As we become more and more distributed across the globe, we will undoubtedly become reliant on distributed platforms to create content.

The opportunity presents itself! Maybe there’s someone on the verge of a brilliant idea for a story. But to create the story for audiences, we must first focus on well-architected infrastructure and technology. Get involved and collaborate with fellow peers. You just might be the seed that sprouts the VR revolution.

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