Radiant Images Delivers VR & 360° Innovation With Wowza Technology

Radiant Images provides creative solutions in virtual and augmented reality technology to the global motion picture industry. As an award-winning leader in digital cinema, Radiant Images uses Wowza technology to deliver virtual reality (VR) and 360° live streams, including such high-profile events as the Beauty and the Beast red carpet premiere and President Obama’s farewell speech. Radiant is the creator of the innovative Mobius POV helmet rig and the Headcase Codex 360 rig, plus many other advances in VR mobility and power solutions. The company is also partnered with VRLIVE, a VR live-streaming network that delivers high-quality, 360° content to any mobile device. 

In this video, Michael Mansouri, co-founder of Radiant Images talks with Chris Michaels, director of communications at Wowza, about how Radiant Images uses Wowza technology to deliver VR and 360° streams to audiences worldwide. Mansouri and Michaels caught up at the 2017 NAB show in Las Vegas.

Full Video Transcript

Chris Michaels:                      

Hey guys, this is Chris Michaels here, the director of communications with Wowza. I am joined with Mike Mansouri, the co-founder of Radiant Images. Radiant, tell us a little bit about what you guys have been doing. You’re based in Los Angeles, if I remember correctly, and you’ve been doing some amazing things with VR and 360.

 

Michael Mansouri:                       

Yeah, so at Radiant, we work in altered realities, which we call now “mixed reality.” We work in base reality, which is what we have now, we work in augmented reality, which is a reality with augmented trigger-points, then also in virtual reality. Virtual reality we are able to create in different formats. One is 360, which is what you see on Facebook, YouTube—and in virtual reality where we actually immerse your audience inside a world. You disconnect them from the real world and place them in this new world. In that, we’ve also worked in live capture, and then in post process—but a lot of these technology breakthroughs are actually based on the live capturing, live stitching and live streaming.

 

Chris Michaels:                       

You’ve been doing a lot of events. We see EDC here, where we’ve seen that in 360, you’ve done amazing videos and experiences for the likes of Ford, and other brands in the world. What are some of the clients and customers that you’re working with regularly?

 

Michael Mansouri:                      

Sure. A lot of those were partnerships with our clients. For example, EDC was with our partnership with VR Live, which is a live-streaming and streaming-capture company. I think a lot of the things that we’ve been doing on the live has been mostly not just capturing 360, but augmenting it also with 2D. I’ll tell you the main difference. The main difference is, we’re in a hall right now, and the only thing we see is this perspective. What we don’t have in virtual reality is the close-up. Or, let’s say if it’s a band member on stage, we want to see the guitar riff. How do we get those close-ups? We can’t bring the virtual reality camera and bring it right on top of the singer, but we have powerful, long lenses, and those elements can get integrated in the live stream, the live capture, so basically we interface directly with the 2D-content creators and give them a much larger canvas to work on.

 

Chris Michaels:                      

It’s very similar to what you did with the Beauty and The Beast red carpet.

 

Michael Mansouri:                      

Exactly.

 

Chris Michaels:                      

Right? So we had a 360 camera, we had an interview set up like this, and you had a 360 camera on one side-

 

Michael Mansouri:                       

And we had this behind us. Yeah, exactly.

 

Chris Michaels:                      

Anybody could see the full 360 experience of the cast members and producers and everybody walking the red carpet into the Chinese Theater.

 

Michael Mansouri:                      

I think that’s the next breakthrough, and that’s—I think that’s also where it really makes sense to do virtual reality, because just VR by itself, in a red carpet experience, I don’t know how engaging that is. I mean, because we’re standing by and letting things go by us, and we don’t have that much interactivity in that world. What people are used to is that interactivity, the close-ups, and that’s what we had. It was a huge success. When Disney did their 2D feed, they had about 790,000 viewerships. On our 360, we had over 2.5 million. It was three times more viewerships than the traditional 2D stream. I would say a huge success.

 

Chris Michaels:                      

One of the more impressive ones is what you did with President Obama.

 

Michael Mansouri:                     

Perfect timing. Yeah, with President Obama, we had a opportunity for his farewell speech. We were contacted by the White House to capture that. We brought our entire live-streaming capability and were able to have multiple cameras. We were able to stream those using Wowza, and we were able to hit every single social media platform. That was a huge hit for us, because that gives us the ability to not just hit one platform, but multiple platforms. Now, it’s not about just creating a virtual reality experience. That gimmick has already faded away. It’s like, how do we make it better than real life? Like we do with motion pictures, how we do it with TV.

We’re not showing reality. We want to show what’s bigger than reality, dream bigger, so that people get wowed. The only way you can do that is by having a depth of solutions. You cannot go into every problem and say, “Well, I’m just going to use this. I’m just going to use this one ball, and it’s going to solve everything,” because it doesn’t. Early on, we try to encourage our content creators just to take chances, to push the boundaries, and do interesting things in virtual reality.