Strangers with Patrick Watson by Felix & Paul Studios has been showered with much acclaim. The VR video, which gives users a piano-side seat for an intimate performance by musician Patrick Watson, has only ever been publicly available on Samsung’s Gear VR, but a remastered version will make its way to the Oculus Rift with a substantial increase in quality.
As Felix & Paul Studios co-founder Paul Raphaël puts it, Strangers with Patrick Watson was one of the first pieces of VR video content to caught the attention of Oculus. The company didn’t see much promise in spherical live-action recordings as VR content—until they saw Strangers that is. Oculus would go on to sign the largest deal of its kind with Felix & Paul Studios.
Strangers is a wonderful experience but, having been shot more than a year ago, it’s starting to look a little aged. It’s also never been available publically anywhere but on Samsung’s Gear VR headset. Fortunately, Raphaël tells me that the experience will be remastered to be released on the Oculus Rift with “almost twice the resolution as the initial Gear VR release.”
“One of the things that’s interesting is that everything that we’ve shot since Strangers was shot at a much higher resolution than any of the screens that are currently out can support, so as the [hardware] evolves, we are remastering a lot of the pieces,” said Raphaël, who also said that the remastered version of Strangers would likely launch alongside the consumer Rift.