The flyby feature in CellexalVR allows users to create a short video showcasing their data. To start using the flyby feature, open up the menu and click the "Flyby menu" button. A flyby is created by defining a number of positions that a camera will fly through and then rendering it as a video.

To create a flyby, you first need to define some checkpoints for the camera to fly through. Look at your data, or any other object you want to record, and press the "Record position" button. A green sphere will appear where your headset was (you might need to move your head back a bit for it to come into view after you press the button). Repeat this process for at least one more different position, again looking at what you want the camera to look at. When you have atleast two checkpoints recorded a preview of the flyby can be seen in the lower part of the flyby menu. A camera will fly between your defined checkpoints along a green line. The green spheres mark the checkpoints you have recorded. You can move and rotate these checkpoints anyway you want by moving a controller into them and pressing the grip button, the same way you grab anything in CellexalVR. When you are holding a checkpoint the camera will temporarily be put on that checkpoint so you can see what the camera will record.

On the middle of each green line segment between two checkpoints there is a cube. You can point the controller at this cube and press the trigger (as if it was a button on the menu) to switch between two modes that define how the camera move between the checkpoints. By default the camera will move in a straight line between the checkpoints, the other mode is a (quadratic) Bézier curve. This means that the camera will follow a curved path between the checkpoints. In this mode the cube that was on the line will become more green-ish and can now be moved to change the curve's characteristics. To switch back to the normal straight line mode, point the controller towards the cube and press the trigger again.

Before you render the flyby you have the option to choose the quality of the rendered video by pressing the "Change Quality" button. The different qualities available are 1080p, 720p and 480p.

Once you are happy with the flyby, click the "Render flyby" button on the menu. This might take a minute or more, depending on how many checkpoints you recorded. When the flyby is rendering the performance of CellexalVR will most likely degrade and you won't be able to easily interact the data. Feel free to take of your headset until the flyby is rendered. The finished flyby will be saved as a .mp4 file in the Output/<username>/<dataset>/Flyby directory. You can easily open this directory by pressing escape on your keyboard and pressing the "Open output folder" button in the settings menu and then clicking in the "Flyby" folder. The output file will have the current date and time appended to its file name. Your menu, the controllers, the green spheres and the green line will not be rendered in the final video, so don't worry about them showing up in the preview. Should you want to highlight some part of your data we suggest you use the draw tool.

Should you at any point want to start over you may click the "Clear positions" button to clear all recorded positions.

When rendering the flyby, the camera will interpolate its position and rotation between each checkpoint and record 96 frames between every checkpoint. Videos are rendered at 24 frames per second, meaning that each checkpoint takes 4 seconds to reach. The maximum number of checkpoints you may have in any single flyby is 10417, which would result in a flyby taking a little more than 11.5 hours to watch (if you have the patience and disk space to let it render in the first place). Flybys are rendered using FFmpeg.