Get ready to put your Sky box on your head and climb right inside Super Sunday (maybe) because Sky’s got big plans for virtual reality. Got tickets for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in July? Before too long the only ticket you might need to feel like you’re there is a VR headset.
In the days leading up to this year’s opening Formula 1 race in Australia, Sky released two VR videos it had shot behind the scenes at pre-season testing in Barcelona. If you own a Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard headset you might’ve seen them.
While they did include onboard footage shot with the Williams F1 team, rather than beginning and ending with the obvious ‘stick a camera on the car and send it round the track’, Sky’s crew also plonked VR cameras on the edge of the pit wall, in the middle of a scrum of journalists as regular presenter Ted Kravitz conducted interviews in the paddock, and over a driver’s head during a pit stop.
The result is totally different to the kind of virtual reality footage you normally see, offering a more fly-on-the-wall approach that also attempts to tell a story, rather than just strapping you in and letting you go. Read More…
