Jaunt Brings Paul McCartney Concert Into Virtual Reality

Big celebrity endorsements can help legitimize a new technology — and legitimacy is something virtual reality needs, with thousands of developers and geeky advocates waiting to see what happens as the first consumer devices go on sale this year.

How’s a former Beatle for you? Good enough?

Cinematic virtual reality company Jaunt is today releasing a video it produced of Paul McCartney performing in August at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. With the right hardware, viewers will assume the place of a camera onstage, right next to McCartney as he sings his James Bond theme song, “Live and Let Die.”

During the performance, which Re/code recently demoed at Jaunt’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., the view changes a couple times to that of a camera in front of the stage, better positioned to capture the onstage pyrotechnic effects.

The video will be available for free through the Oculus Share store for developers with an Oculus Rift prototype, but also through Google Play for Android users with already-available phone holder-headsets like Google Cardboard or Dodocase. Jaunt CEO Jens Christensen said the company is focusing more on mobile as the right place for virtual reality movies.

The McCartney clip is intended as a pitch of sorts for Jaunt, which makes both a 360-degree, 3-D camera and the rendering technology to turn video filmed for VR into a watchable product. Christensen said it currently takes 15 minutes to render one minute of VR video, and one of Jaunt’s main goals is getting that ratio smaller.

CTO Arthur van Hoff said the app streams the video online as a progressive download, and Jaunt recommends doing so over Wi-Fi rather than a phone’s cellular network connection. The highest-quality version of the clip, which lasts about three minutes, is 400 megabytes due to the amount of video and audio combined into one file.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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