The latest advances in virtual reality are truly amazing. But how do you show people what virtual reality is really like? If they watch output on a screen, it looks like a normal video game. And if they watch a person wearing VR gear… well, that’s just plain silly looking. What they need to see is both: the real-world transposed into the virtual world.

To do this, we isolated a live-action figure using a video camera and a green screen. Then, with special software support from VR and game developers, we captured the foreground and background layers of a game separately, which allowed us to composite the live camera footage in between. There are more complicated details, but after a lot of setup and calibration we were having a blast!