91热爆

What’s it all about

The Family Farm, on 91热爆 One, sees three families, from across the UK, ditch the 9-5 to experience a very different life on a farm high in the mountains of Snowdonia. The programme follows the families as they are pushed to the limits by the realities of life on a Welsh hill farm, under the watchful eye of wildlife presenter Kate Humble and the farms’ owner Gareth Wyn Jones.

We wanted to give the audience a chance to take a more leisurely tour of Gareth’s farm and get a feel for the environment the families worked in. Gareth is your guide as you take a wander around the key locations from the programme. It is chance to absorb the beautiful farmland, the soundscape and of course meet some of the animals.

What are you trying to learn through doing this pilot?

The tour uses WebVR to deliver a simple 360/VR experience over the internet, without the need to download a specific app. We are experimenting with what’s possible to deliver using this approach and how it can be used to create a more immersive journey through the video and audio clips supporting a TV programme.

Previous experiments for Hinterland and Doctor Who focused on drama output and were limited to viewing on desktop and mobile. In this instance, we are looking at what works for factual content and have included the option for using your phone in a VR headset.

This introduces some limitations, as current mobile phone browsers don’t all support the ability to play videos within VR, but this gives us the chance to investigate how effective viewing this kind of content is and the user Experience design challenges of moving in and out of VR.

We’ve also used an aerial view of the farm to give the user a flavour of the layout of the farm and put the locations in context. Hopefully this also means they can orientate themselves more effectively than in previous 360 tours.

How was it made?

The tour uses 360 stills of each location, enhanced with videos taken from the programme and a wildlife audio track. Best viewed on a mobile phone or tablet you can look around each location by moving your device. There is also a Virtual Reality (VR) mode on mobile, which can be used to view the locations in a VR headset.

What challenges did you face?

While we were spoilt for choice on the locations we were able to shoot, it is difficult to deliver the imagery at high quality when streaming an interactive 360 experience over the web. 360 videos are particularly large files and difficult to stream to mobile devices, while also allowing the user to interact with them. Unfortunately, for this reason, we’ve had to sacrifice motion for clarity and used 360 stills for most locations.