VR – will it be DOA just like stereo 3D ?

[Michael Gissing]

3D was a different way to view conventional screen content. VR is a whole different beast and I see it as successfully competing for attention, not a gimmick add on to existing entertainment media.

Like nuclear fusion it has been ‘ten years away’ from being something for over thirty years now. I had a professional VR demo a few weeks ago and I can see it has commercial and entertainment potential finally. Latency is now so low as to not matter. Images are not longer blurred or flickering. Interactivity is much improved and I really think it will take big chunks out of peoples entertainment time because it is now cheap, really good and impressive.

It’s not for everyone but for gamers and stay at home kids who don’t watch broadcast TV or go to the movies, it will be a big thing. As content providers, we all have to know about this tech as it has finally arrived. I don’t expect it will be significant for me but I don’t think it is a gimmick.

[Noah Kadner]

Hoping it will go somewhere. But yeah at the end of the day it’s still goggles which only a certain percentage of consumers can actually stand.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops

[Michael Horton]

We are making 360 Video a big part of this years SuperMeet. Not because we think it is here to stay, but because we think its something you need to know. We are calling the presentation “Can you Tell a Compelling Story in VR and 360° Video?” We hope someone can. We haven’t seen it yet.

Michael Horton
lacpug
https://www.lafcpug.org

[Gary Huff]

[Michael Horton] “We are calling the presentation ‘Can you Tell a Compelling Story in VR and 360° Video?'”

Betteridge’s law of headlines.

[Michael Horton]

I guess I should of said I have not see it yet not WE.

Michael Horton
lacpug
https://www.lafcpug.org

[Tim Wilson]

[Noah Kadner] “at the end of the day it’s still goggles”

We’re just chit-chatting here, but I’m waiting for the first self-appointed pundit no-it-all to say that they’re not interested until they can do it without glasses.

This really is something though. It’s not content that you can enjoy “just as well, or even better, in 2D.” It doesn’t exist in 2D.

I’m also not convinced that narrative is going to happen any time soon. We’ve just now gotten to the point of the first truly POV movie and it’s AWFUL.

Remember the whole idea of branching stories in interactive TV? Well, it’s real, it’s compelling, and it’s called a videogame.

The VR stuff that blows me away is like the New York Times VR app: stroll through the streets of New York, be in the middle of a Paris vigil, things that really take you somewhere.

For now, I’m thinking that VR is to Viewmaster as movies are to photos: same general idea, but in motion. And I’m up for a visit to the gardens at Versailles or diving a coral reef than I am a linear narrative.

I’m not the one to ask though. I still adore 3D, so I’ll refrain from trying to extrapolate outward from my enthusiasm.

YET.

lol

[Herb Sevush]

VR is the 3D of today and the Quadraphonic Sound of tomorrow. Given my grouchy old man aesthetic this opinion should not surprise anyone, but I will hang my hat on my early and frequent disdain of 3D TV. I do think VR has an audience, but not one that requires my services, and I wish Adobe had spent more time on plugging the holes in Ppro rather than adding meaningless features for a market that doesn’t yet exist.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[David Lawrence]

There’s a ton of hype and a ton of money being invested in VR right now. We’re talking many billions of dollars being spent and in projected returns. It’s a total frenzy, one of those rare moments in tech that comes along every couple decades or so. (Blame Facebook for buying Oculus for $2Billion. Crazy.)

I spent the fall deeply immersed in this stuff working with one of the big players in the scene and am still involved. My personal observations:

This is a whole new medium. It’s real and it’s not a flash in the pan.

It’s way over hyped and won’t make nearly as much money as people think. ($21Billion? Nope!)

It’s not a storytelling medium like filmmaking. It’s something completely different.

Some techniques that work with filmmaking work in VR and some totally don’t. We need a lot more benchmarking and experimentation.

[Oliver Peters] “My thoughts are that it’s a cool trick and will have a niche market, just like stereo 3D. But it won’t become the next great mainstream storytelling method. The main hindrence is that it requires the glasses, like 3D.”

I agree the glasses are a huge barrier. It’ll never be like going to a theater enjoying a film with your friends (or watching together at home). VR is a highly personal experience that can’t be shared the way we share movies. I think it’s much more like reading a book.

I really dislike the term “Virtual Reality”. I think it sets the bar for reality way too low. For 360 filmmaking, I prefer the term “immersive filmmaking”. It’s about creating a sense of presence, not about trying to make the Holodeck. Chris Milk’s documentaries on VRSE are good current examples.

Nobody knows what they’re doing. Anyone who claims to is either bluffing or doesn’t know what they don’t know 😉 It’s the wild west and the field’s wide open.

There’s no better time to experiment and try weird new stuff. It’s a fun and exciting time!

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research

linkedIn: https://lnkd.in/Cfz92F
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facebook: /dlawrence
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[Steve Connor]

[David Lawrence] “It’s not a storytelling medium like filmmaking. It’s something completely different.
“

I’d love you to be wrong about this, It’s been a while since we had a new way to tell stories

[David Lawrence] “It’s the wild west and the field’s wide open.

There’s no better time to experiment and try weird new stuff. It’s a fun and exciting time!
“

Yee ha!

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] ” I wish Adobe had spent more time on plugging the holes in Ppro rather than adding meaningless features for a market that doesn’t yet exist.”

One certainly hopes that it’s not an either/or, that Adobe has enough engineering resources to take this on…

…but in the scheme of things, the egg always comes first.

I think this is the 20th anniversary of the time I first saw HD at NAB. What a fgjking joke that was! Looked terrible, insanely inexpensive, no content, no distribution channel, NOTHING.

As late as the turn of the century, people were still adamant that it was a niche market. Certainly no way to deliver it over cable a couple of years AFTER the turn of the century. CAN’T BE DONE.

Until it could. And yes, ironically, rabbit ears still produce the best HD BY FAR, but it took a solid 15 years from “The Year of HD” at NAB to translate into genuinely widespread HD, which 20+ years later, is by no means ubiquitous. But is it “here”? Indubitably.

So the question isn’t, is it here YET? The question is, might there be a THERE there in 20 years? It seems ridiculous to bet against it.

Heck, by that standard, we’re only 6 years after “The Year of 3D” at NAB, in 2010. That means we’re at LEAST 10 years away from knowing what we’ve got, and probably more like 15.

One clue: the cost in manufacturing currently-capable 3D is virtually zero, so it’s basically included free with most 4K TVs, even if the manufacturer doesn’t mention it. So Gen 1 tech is commoditized, now it’s time to look at 3D 2.0. We have another 10 years to get there.

Throw in HDR, which as Mark Raudonis notes, is AT LEAST as compelling as HD, and I’d argue maybe moreso.

[David Lawrence] “VR is a highly personal experience that can’t be shared the way we share movies. I think it’s much more like reading a book.”

That’s the key.

I wasn’t being facetious when I invoked Viewmaster. *I* hold it in MY hands. When I’m done, I take it out of my hands, and put it in your hands.

The reason why I think it won’t work for narrative just yet is that it takes out the narrator! The whole point of narrative, editing, everything we do is look HERE.

The point of VR is, look AROUND.

And it’s compelling because I’M doing the looking, not you. I’m looking at what *I* want to see.

Now, there IS a way to combine narrative with audience-driven perspective, and as I noted, it’s called a video game. A “true” narrative is still gonna require some kind of UI overlay to tell me that I *can* look around, and that I’m not going to miss something important that my $20 million movie star is doing or saying behind me.

That’s the other problem. I’m SUPPOSED to be looking at specific people doing and saying specific things at specific times. It’s the OPPOSITE of self-guided narrative-lessness.

Where it starts to get interesting is in 2nd screen and supportive (aka “carry along”) content. The kind of thing that you watch on a fan site or an old school DVD extra.

Walk through this character’s house. Here’s what it’s like to do a stunt dive through a 4th floor window onto an inflatable blue cushion. Walk around the soundstage to see where we’ve placed the cameras and lights for this next scene.

VR makeup trailer for Walking Dead, anyone? VR trip to Andy Serkis’ mocap stage? In the recording studio with (insert the name of your favorite non-lame musician here).

THAT kind of thing gets super-duper compelling. I’d pay for some of that.

Here’s the thing. Even if you aren’t willing to spend $16 on Google cardboard (WHICH WORKS), no kidding, go to your favorite app store and look at the NYT VR app. See what’s there. It’s just a start, but a substantial one.

For one example, you may not want to stand in the middle of vigil in Paris, but think about the possibilities for extending the empathetic reach of humanity! I can LITERALLY stand with the people of Paris. I can LITERALLY walk with war orphans in Sudan and the Ukraine!

I think of empathy as the fundamental human characteristic, the basis of every relationship and every civilization. So I’m less excited by the idea of new kinds of narrative than I am by TRANSPORTATIONAL TRANSFORMATION.

That by GOING to a new PLACE, and connecting with immersive experiences beyond my own, I deepen my engagement with the entire human community.

Yeah, utopians are always wrong, always. And I’m definitely speaking from my roots as an activist documentarian, who believes that utopian visions are still the only ones worth being guided by.

(Documentarians who claim not to be activists are either lying to you, or lying to themselves. Avoid them at all costs. Dystopian documentarians are just boring, because they’re all saying the same thing.)

But I honestly believe that anything that adds more strands to the fabric of human experience is miraculous.

BTW, here’s a great story about the first VR editor at any publication, the VR editor at NYT, Jenna Pirog.

While Pirog is the only full-time staffer devoted to VR, she works with about 30 colleagues from the Times’ newsroom, video, marketing and graphics department to create the films that live on the NYT VR app.

Pirog sits in the magazine’s pitch meetings to figure out which stories could use a VR component, asking the question: “Where can we take them that will be surprising and informative?”

Holy crap! That sounds like actual news! Like maybe the only part of the NYT that still cares about that! LOL

All this said, feel free to ignore my stuff about the evolution of the human organism. What it CAN do is ultimately irrelevant to what it DOES do.

I do think, though, that the MEDIUM of VR is driven less by NARRATIVE than by TRANSPORTATION. I want this to PUT me somewhere, and I want it to turn me loose. Let me look around.

This still requires authorial intent at some level. Jenna Pirog knows what the story is…but the point isn’t for me to be guided by her view of what the story is. The point is to be put in PLACES, with PEOPLE, and let my own story be shaped by these other people.

So, coming full circle, it’s not the next horizon in narration to me. It’s the next horizon in documentary, in the most exalted AND most mundane senses of the word.

National Geographic has a VR film of an active volcano. Better than the chupacabra nonsense on their TV channel, for sure. Very enriching. The kind of stuff I wish they’d been doing all along.

But screw that. Put me on the stage with Madonna, STAT! Crowd surfing at Coachella, here I come! LOL