Presence

May 31, 2016 12:53 PM

Using photogrammetry, Claire Hentschker has extracted the physical space of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining' from the first 30 minutes of the film and reassembled it in VR along the original camera path.

Related: a VR recreation of Deckard's apartment in "Blade Runner".

posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul (18 comments total)

turns out i'm bad at guessing what this would look like
posted by beerperson at 1:08 PM on May 31, 2016

Oh, so *that's* where the Max Payne people got their ideas for their bad trip/nightmare levels...
posted by Earthtopus at 1:12 PM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

YouTube does VR?
posted by 256 at 1:26 PM on May 31, 2016

Oh man this is great. For years I've been wanting to digitally reconstruct my family's historical houses through pictures and it's cool to see some people working on that kind of thing.
posted by rhizome at 1:37 PM on May 31, 2016

Like, whoa.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:41 PM on May 31, 2016

"YouTube does VR?"

Yeah, it's called Youtube 360
posted by I-baLL at 2:13 PM on May 31, 2016

I should also point out that you can use the W,A,S,D keys to look around.
posted by I-baLL at 2:13 PM on May 31, 2016

I should also point out that you can use the W,A,S,D keys to look around.

Am I missing something? Those keys have no effect on the video here. the YouTube page says 360 VIDEO DRAG MOUSE TO MOVE but that's not doing anything either.
posted by Trinity-Gehenna at 2:18 PM on May 31, 2016

you're referring to the first video, right? Click and hold and drag the mouse on the video once it's playing and see if it moves the view. If it does then you can also use the WASD keys.
posted by I-baLL at 2:21 PM on May 31, 2016

That's what I assumed, but nope. Ah, well.
posted by Trinity-Gehenna at 2:31 PM on May 31, 2016

So why does it look like the sets of the Shining if they were made of whipped cream and ravaged by a wild dingo? I would think they had enough visual information to at least complete the walls or whatever.
posted by fungible at 2:43 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

I dunno about making the 3D YouTube video, but apart from that this looks like a pretty bog standard bit of photogrammetry (and I agree with fungible that it's lower res than I would have expected; probably to speed up processing time).

But these days, the 3D model side of this isn't actually that hard, although the software you need is pretty pricey (the free stuff still crashes too often with too poor support ...). 1. Get yourself VLC and tell it to spit out the frames of video to images. 2. Download the trial version of something like Agisoft or maybe RealityCapture, which runs so much faster. 3. Drop the images into the software and press "GO". 4. Voila, 3D model!

I expect we'll be seeing lots more people doing structure from motion from various movies, and hopefully next time it's higher resolution and not what seems like sparse point clouds with low poly meshes.
posted by barnacles at 3:01 PM on May 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

Is this... even possible? I'd read lots of stuff about how The Shining set was designed to not make sense in actual space. Lots of inconsistencies to disorient the viewer.
posted by naju at 3:04 PM on May 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that if you play this clip forward and backwards at the same time it opens a wormhole where an avatar of Kubrick calmly explains how he faked the moon landing and that he's been waiting for us to discover the secret ever since.

Or maybe something about Native American genocide or a minotaur.
posted by vuron at 7:09 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

Tangentially related, Adam Savage built a replica of the model of the hedge maze that appears in the movie.
posted by smcameron at 8:20 PM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

super cool idea but it looks so bended, curved and psychedelic it doesn't quite work. at least watching on YouTube and dragging the mouse around.
posted by TMezz at 10:55 PM on May 31, 2016

Is this... even possible? I'd read lots of stuff about how The Shining set was designed to not make sense in actual space. Lots of inconsistencies to disorient the viewer.


You're probably thinking about this article (which is actually part 4 of 21 of a larger essay)
Be sure to check the bottom for a disagreement from a screenwriter.

via this 2011 mefi post.
posted by Theta States at 6:53 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

naju, here's a look at that: Spatial Impossibilities Made The Shining Even Creepier.

ed: sorry, didn't notice Theta State's better links before posting.
posted by drjon at 7:00 AM on June 1, 2016