For the third phase of the project I looked into the ways in which digital production techniques can be scaled from their large, often financially inaccessible counterparts to smaller, simpler, and cheaper techniques. This includes how grassroots and emerging companies may be able to access and use this technology without 

A large focus of all of my research work has been ensuring that all the equipment and software required is the most affordable on the market. This played a large role in my research into scalability. Actually scaling from large production to a small one doesn't incur that many changes unless you are accounting for the reduced budget. As I have touched on many times over this project the key to ensuring wider proliferation is by using hardware and software that is as universally accessible as possible so the barriers to learning and use are as few as possible.  

Technology for VR development is relatively simple to scale back in terms of cost of development. A standalone VR headset that requires no additional technical support is £400, which although it is not cheap is a much lower price compared to a lot of high end VR in the spaces. Most of the software you might want to use to develop is free, software like Maya, Blender, Unity, Unreal Engine. They are free until you start generating enough profit to be able to afford them so it's a really great place for beginners and there are hundreds of tutorials online on how to use these software's for VR development. 

The major draw back with scaling for VR is how you then use it in an audience perspective. I've seen shows massively reducing audience sizes, or casting the VR view or the performer, or just having the actor wearing a VR headset and explainign what is happening. One on one performances are also common but it is very difficult ot scale the use of VR to all audience members without investing in a huge number of headset and I think this is where some of VR use in theatre will become more popular once personal ownership of headsets becomes as common place as owning a mobile phone. If you can assume users own one then you don't need to provide them to all you audience members. 

Virtual Production is an inherently large scale and expensive production choice. It required camera tracking, high quality cameras, and particularly costly a large array of LCD screens to display the graphics and create the truly immersive feel for those working on Virtual Production sites. The easiest way to begin to scale this down to size is by removing the LCD screens. You can scale this by replacing the screens with green screen which is very cheap and then implementing the graphics afterwards or alternatively you can use projection to approximate a version of Virtual Production. 

If your form of virtual production is video walls then projection provides and incredibly good counterpart. If however you require more camera and person interaction projection is difficult to replicate in the way needed and so greenscreen becomes more useful. there are obvious draw backs when using both for Virtual production but they can be a good starting point. 

The set up used for PC integrated VR, including motion tracking points and controllers can be used to replicate the complex high end camera tracking equipment. If you use the motion tracking docks from a VR headset and place the controller on a camera you can use software to interpret the data as if it were tracking the camera and utilise this to develop an at home version of Virtual production. As with VR development most if not all of this work can done on free open source software. However it does require the initial start up costs of a compatible PC and PCVR headset and controllers. 

Scaling 360 camera's isn't quite the same process. Due to the wide range and variety of camera's out there it's possible to just search for the cheapest counterparts and utilise this for your 360 needs. This however comes with the expected pay offs. The video quality may be limited, the scaling may be inaccurate when re-watching the videos. You will loose or gain certain features such as underwater capabilities. 

The next thing to take into account is editing. Editing, loading and viewing 360 videos takes a large amount of storage and specific software's that are able to support the format types and these aren't often available for free in a lot of the ways the other software's I've investigated are. 

Overall I found the Go Pro Max 360 gave the best combination of being affordable, coming with compatible software and including underwaters use, spatial audio and also the functionality to be able to record in many different formats. The video quality after loading on the headset isn't the highest and the scaling is off, you feel like you are about a 10th of the size of a normal person. But as with all these scaling suggestions it is a really good place to begin a journey into 360 videography is you're looking to try out techniques without investing lots of time ,money and energy.