LEGO Star Wars The Last Jedi Interactive 360 Experience

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LEGO Star Wars Interactive 360 Video

Client: The LEGO Group & Lucasfilm

Animation Studio: Atwater Studios

A companion piece to the Star Wars: The Last Jedi, this collection of 10 Stereo 360 animations were created as companion pieces to the movie's LEGO Product line. One of the first animated 360 pieces released on Youtube, we really had to do our research on the technology we would need to utilize to get the best results.

Making Stereoscopic 360 Possible

360 Stereo playback has finally been made possible for the average viewer. It was time to test out and see what was possible and what would be involved with creating content like this. We took it upon ourselves to test out an idea we had come up with where you're in a crashed Snowspeeder as an ATAT walks over you and gave it a whirl. This test footage is best experienced with a VR headset so you can really get the sense of scale and hear the spatial audio.

Storytelling in 360

One of the major benefits of doing a stereo 360 experience is achieving the sense of scale of a giant BB8 droid or an enormous walker that's looming overhead. This of course comes with many challenges. Unlike standard format animation, there's no hiding things off camera. So if you have 12 characters in a scene, all 12 of those characters have to be acting for the duration they're in the scene. Another challenge with this type of content is the possibility of viewers getting motion sickness. That's why we decided to keep the camera locked down for the majority of the animation and in the end it's almost like an immersive play taking place right around you.

Creating The Best Experience Possible

We knew early on that we wanted to create as immersive an experience as possible in this medium. For this reason we decided to go with not just 360 but with stereo output. When viewed on a VR headset, the stereo footage allows you to see the depth and scale of the story. We also chose to shrink the viewer down to the size of a LEGO mini to bring you into their world as opposed to the alternative of feeling like you're looking inside of a dollhouse. We also went with a large 6k square resolution to give the image as much fidelity as possible, which could future proof the viewing experience.

Finally we implemented spatial audio. Unlike your standard stereo or surround output used in a normal video, with 360, the viewer can look at any point in the video. This means the audio direction actually changes based on where they look. To sound design in this way, sounds are actually placed within 3D space. This proved quite challenging with the tools that existed but we were able to get a workflow all figured out.