Dear angelica: breathing life into VR illustrations

In many ways, Oculus Story Studio's VR experience, "Dear Angelica" as shown in Figure 1, is a unique project. We wanted to immerse the viewers inside a series of hand-drawn illustrations and tell a story by artfully transitioning between the drawings, and breathe life into these drawings by adding various animations and visual effects. In trying to create this ground-breaking experience, we had to create a brand-new pipeline: from inventing the tools to create these 3D illustrations, to processing and animating the drawings, to rendering them in virtual reality.