by BONZO, HSM Editor

Yes, there is already a portable camera in Home. But it needs an update.

Granted, the LOOT Modular Stage Set and Active Camera item were tremendous advances for Home cinematographers. But one is a specific personal space, and the other is a furniture item, which means it can only be used in a personal space. What can you do if you want to shoot footage in a public space, through a first person perspective?

We have found ways to do this, forcing the camera into a first-person view by using the Urban Camo gear or other clever methods. Not to mention some careful video editing afterwards. But what if there was another way? What if there was an actual portable item in your Inventory that let you shoot video anywhere your avatar could go?

Have you noticed that the portable item list is mostly filled by companions? However, each Inventory holds two items which are not sidekicks: the Bubble Machine and the Camera. Why haven’t other, non-pet portable items been explored?

The Bubble Machine was our first portable item, and every new Home user gets one free. It’s really quite ingenious, yet very little attention has been given to it, nor has a similar item been produced since. The Bubble Machine is one of the few portable items that stays where you put it — you can set it down and walk as far away as you want, and it just stays there. Staying in one place it is a very unique function.

Now imagine for a minute that LOOT could integrate their active camera function into a similar portable item. Your Inventory would contain a camera on a tripod. You set it up, and it stays where you put it. And only you, the owner, can control it. This portable camera could let you record footage and upload it to YouTube, and give you a couple of camera angles, with transitional modes between them. Ideally it would include the same functionality as the MIB public headquarters camera, which lets you show only your friends, or hide all avatars. That could be a very powerful (not to mention useful) function when filming video in a public space.

So that’s the fantasy feature list. But items do have memory constraints, and maybe what we have dreamed is not practical. So let us prioritize. How about just a portable motion picture camera that gives you a first-person perspective and pan-and-zoom controls. Eliminate the recording function, if it would take too much memory. Third-party capture devices are becoming quite affordable.

Depth of Field

Maybe it doesn’t even have to be a new item. How about a retroactive update to the existing still camera, already in our inventories? Just eliminate the focal point target and crop lines that appear in first-person mode, and make the screen view a clean slate. That would solve many problems. We can use the camera as a lens, to capture our own video.

As long as we are dreaming of a camera update, how about adding a few more features? We’ve already mentioned removing the crop lines and focal target. How about adding automated zoom in and zoom out, and some depth of field and aperture settings. Aperture settings would of course have to be simulated, as there are no actual photons bouncing around in the virtual setting in Home.

At the moment you can trick the current functions a little. If you hold down the square button, you get a flash simulation that brightens your subject. And of course a lot can be done in PhotoShop later. But a little more control of the flash would be nice, or a built-in light to brighten a dark subject. What if you could also increase the exposure time, creating artistic motion blur in a rapidly-changing scene? Or actually set a focal point, which would blur the foreground and background and keep your subject in focus? Or play with the depth of field?

There is a real need for a portable video recording camera, preferably one that stays where you put it, like a Bubble Machine. What if your camera could stay in one place and film you walking away from it? The growing number of Home users making machinima would welcome such an innovation, and wouldn’t hesitate to spend double what we spend on a companion now.

A recording function would be nice, but as we have seen with the active camera, that function is limited. It doesn’t record in HD, and it drops the real time graphics engine frame rate. Thus the quality of the video isn’t on par with what we see live in Home. As a result, many serious Home film makers use third-party PVR devices instead of the automatic recording feature.

A truly innovative approach would be to add some motion-picture functionality to the current still camera. As with the current still camera, we would toggle between third-person and first-person views by pressing L2. But there would be no crop lines or focal target, and we could still walk around while maintaining the first-person perspective, instead of being stuck in one place.

Exposure Settings in .5 increments

Or, here’s another idea: why not just give the Home user the option to switch between the standard third-person perspective and a first-person perspective with the L2 button? No camera involved — the avatar itself would have multiple points of view. The L2 button is currently unused, and we are are already used to using it to toggle point-of-view in the Camera. Videographers could use whatever capture technology they wish to film what their avatar is seeing.

Even without the option to zoom or transition between angles, a depth of field simulation, or exposure control, the ability to switch to a first person perspective would be invaluable to any of the many Home users making machinima. While we can get around the current limitations through clever methods, and while many of us love the standard third-person perspective, having the option to switch to an all-encompassing view without our avatars in the way would be a grand leap forward, letting us see Home in a fresh new perspective.

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2 Responses to “Portable Camera?”

1. Godzprototype says:

   September 15, 2012 at 4:10 pm

   I love all of the ideas above. That first person perspective is most important.
   I really love the field of depth idea though. It takes a lot to make that happen in an editor. The results are, excellent film. I really hope people keep this request on the table!

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