VR is not a passing fad

If you are one of those people who needs to argue that VR is not just a passing fad, take a look at these two articles:

First, WIRED mag’s post Slickest Things Google Debuted Today

Among the announcements for further development of AI, Google is also developing a standalone VR headset—“no cables, no phone, no PC, just VR”.  As I said in my previous post we are entering a moment where the largest, most capital rich companies in the world are actively pursuing VR as a new revenue stream.  As the costs of the hardware falls and the capabilities of the software rise there will be much broader use and demand for VR experiences.  This includes VR as a non-commercial art medium, which brings me to the second article.

Variety’s post from Cannes: How Alejandro G. Inarritu Used Virtual Reality to Tackle Illegal Immigration

(Apologies to the incorrect spelling of Mr. Inarritu's name, but I could not figure out how to get diacritical marks on the blog editor)

The review of an Inarritu VR installation at Cannes by Variety’s Senior Film and Media Editor, Brent Lang, makes some VR claims via quotes Inarritu and his collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki made that need to be addressed.

To start with, Lang claims the 6 minute VR piece is a “shattering new virtual reality experience” in which “there’s never been an installation of quite this size and scope”.  Er, okay . . . considering Variety is the Hollywood hype machine par excellence I’ll let the hyperbole go, but I find the supporting quotes from Inarritu and Lubezki simplistic and revealing a lack of understanding of the VR medium.

Who knew VR was an art form?

First, Inarritu claims VR has been “used to hawk Hollywood blockbusters, not to tackle hot button issues”.  He goes on to say, “The big mistake of VR is that it has been considered an extension of cinema.  It has been considered a promotional tool.  It has been devalued.  This is an art in itself”.  This is what I might expect from someone who is a film director working in the studio system.

What he should have said was, “I, me personally, have made the big mistake of considering VR an extension of cinema”.  VR got its start in the digital world 30 years ago as part of a NASA project which had nothing to do with cinema.  Inarritu obviously came to VR through his work as a cinema director for movie studios and seems unaware of all the development that has happened (and continues) in VR in the fields of education, medicine, robotics, and a host of others.  This is much like President Trump stating, “Who knew health care was so complicated?”  As a personal note: I was creating “VR art”, whatever that is/was, 25 years ago using what was available at the time: QuickTime VR and VRML.  Welcome to the club Mr. Inarritu.

Brother, can you spare a dime for a VR project?

Lang comments, “The roughly six-minute experience is being backed by Legendary Entertainment and Fondazione Prada, neither of whom plan to make a penny on the installation”.  So what?  The reason VR is being developed at all is because there are now opportunities for monetizing the product that didn’t exist before.  Furthermore, with the commercialization of VR, there are new opportunities for VR artist because there are companies creating revenue-generating VR that can afford to fund VR for non-commercial use (e.g. art)—even for famous, wealthy people like Mr. Inarritu.

My past work presaged the whole VR craze, of course

Lang writes, “Lubezki believes virtual reality is a natural extension of recent works such as “The Revenant” and “Birdman” that used long takes to create a feeling of verisimilitude and plunge people into a frontier landscape or backstage on Broadway.”  Quoting Lubezki directly “We’ve been looking for this.  ‘Birdman’ and ‘Revenant’ were immersive.  There’s an immediacy.  This is all of that and even more."

That’s all fine and good, but “immersive” filmmaking has been around a long time.  I’m old enough to have grown up seeing John Cassevettes’ and Stanley Kubrick’s films and I can’t think of more immersive works than “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”, “2001”, or “The Shining”.  Even my own recent feature, “Holiday”, is highly immersive and very much about experiencing a “place”.

Mr. Lubezki and Mr. Inarritu seem to want to set themselves up as creators of proto-VR in order to legitimize their very first foray into VR, which only makes them sound naive about a medium in which they have no prior experience.

VR is the future, stupid

Lang writes, “Lubezki claims returning to traditional filmmaking will be difficult”.  Hmm. Okay, but be aware the pay for DPs and directors in VR is not what you are used to receiving from the studios.  Just sayin’ . . . 

Lang also states, “Inarritu thinks that soon traditional films, with their flat screen and traditional plotting will seem anachronistic to a rising generation looking for something more experiential.  He warns that studios ignore the medium at their own peril.  ‘If the studios don’t get into it, they will be irrelevant soon . . . Filmmakers will be very attracted to this’”.

Wow.  Okay, first of all, as far as I can tell ALL of the major studios are developing VR in some capacity or another.  They are not ignoring the medium, they’re simply figuring out how to monetize a medium that at the high end is very expensive.  It is their charge to make money off entertainment.  They are in the entertainment business, not the art business.

Stylizing the ugliness

One last commentary on the VR piece itself.  It is described as an experience of attempting to illegally cross from Mexico into the United States.  Perhaps the elite crowd at the world’s most glamorous film festival will get a sense of the terror of that moment.  I haven’t experienced the piece, but I think the piece misses the mark at a very basic level.

Lang suggests that the work, entitled “Carne y Arena” is an “empathy machine”, as Roger Ebert claimed was the case for movies.  Lang writes, “’Carne y Arena’ is trying to make viewers appreciate the risks that refugees take in search of a better life.  Inarritu . . . said that many Mexicans are fleeing gang violence that has made the country the second deadliest in the world after Syria.”

It seems to me that what should be experienced is the violence these people need to escape from.  Show what their lives are like when they are the victims of criminals, not criminals themselves (attempting to cross illegally).  But violence in VR is a tough sell.  A little fake cat and mouse entertainment after a few martinis is all good fun, but watching your family be gunned down in front of you, well that’s not quite the same thing, is it?

What I find odd is that this is a director with no problem including savage violence in his movies, but shies away from it in another medium.  Don’t be coy with your political art, Mr Inarritu.  My film “Holiday” is about the abduction of a young woman from Venice Beach.  I force the audience to experience the gritty horror of that act.  I didn’t stylize the violence so it looked cool or entertaining.  I kept the whole feature very concrete in its imagery, privileging experience of the moment over character empathy.  It makes for a film most people don’t like, but I’d argue it more of a proto-VR narrative experience than any film by Mr. Inarritu.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Mr. Inarritu’s films, I just feel his very first VR work is not quite the landmark in the medium his PR team is pitching it as.  Hopefully he will choose to do more.

VR will come on strong, soon

I read an interesting article today in The Atlantic by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Weird Thing About Today's Internet.  Madrigal lays out a brief 10 year history of the internet with its impact on both business and culture.

She states that in 2007, the year Apple introduced the iphone, almost no one owned a smartphone.  She then points out, "Now there are 2.5 billion smartphones in the world.  That's more than double the number of PCs that have ever been at use in the world."  With those sorts of numbers, in the near future when VR goggles are given away with your purchase of a phone and those phones are running an OS designed for a 360 3D interface, 2D media will quickly become the "only if I have to" choice of younger audiences.

It's all about large amounts of customers and capital

25 years ago VR got off to an arrested start and was doomed for the time being for a number of reasons.  Experience of VR in the 1990's required all sorts of special OS platforms and viewers, such as QuickTime VR for Apple (released 1995) and VRML for Silicon Graphics (WWW approval 1994), thus the number of people who could even access VR was extremely limited.  None of this would lead to wide acceptance and predictably these formats faded out.  Today, however, with the integration of VR into smartphones, billions of people can access the environment easily.

Furthermore, in the 1990's there was very little capital available for development of VR.  Now the world is very different.  Madrigal points out the five most valuable companies in the world today: Apple, Goggle, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.  Madrigal states, "In mid-May of 2007, these five companies were worth $577 billion.  Now they represent $2.9 trillion worth of market value!  Not so far off the combined market cap ($2.85) of the top 10 largest companies of 2007: Exxon Mobil, GE, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, AT&T, Citigroup, Gazprom, BP, Toyota, and Bank of America."

The implications for this shift are dramatic in a number of ways, but from a VR development perspective, this shift means VR will develop much more quickly in the coming years.  All of these companies are developing media production arms and all are investing in VR hardware and software development.  This is the first time in the history of VR that the top corporations in the world were all heavily invested in VR development.  The result will be a rapid expansion of this new GUI.

VR in Reality is a GUI

This seems painfully obvious and yet is rarely considered beyond the rooms where software and hardware peeps building these things.  The sizzle is the emotional space the interface puts you in, not the steak that gets you there, so that—the recreation of reality—is what gets put forward.  Additionally, there are so few interface hardware products out there that the differences between them are relatively small.  When we finally have a range of hardware products to choose from that extends from a used Toyota to a Bentley, then we’ll see more discussion of VR as a GUI in the public sphere.

Historical context in order to demystify the product called VR

So just briefly, let me historically contextualize computer interfaces and photographic imagery.

Computer interfaces

I’m old enough and was exposed young enough that I remember when computers didn’t have monitors.  You typed your program onto punch cards, fed the program into the card reader, which in turn created a spool of yellow paper tape with holes punched in it, which was then fed into the computer, which ran the program and printed a result on giant green and white paper.  Then came monochrome monitors, then color, blah, blah, blah all the way up to where we are today—VR goggles—the latest computer interface.  And one thing that hardware can do with the right graphical user interface (GUI) is fool the brain’s senses of sight and sound into believing it is somewhere other than where it is in reality.

But if you are not trying to fool the brain, you don’t need goggles. Goggles (which will become glasses) to recreate reality are just one possible use of a 360, 3D space projected in front of your eyes and very quickly will become your just your portable system.  Your home system will be much different.  How about a curved display you bring in front of you on a reticulated arm?

Photography

There is a focus on recreating reality with this product at the moment because it is a new image-based media.  It was the same when photography was invented, then movie projection, then television.  All were pitched as devices that made the viewer feel more like there were “there”, in reality.  But people very quickly adjusted to those media as only representations of reality (it didn’t take long for audiences to figure out the train was not going to come out of the movie screen and run over them—but they did at first).  The same will happen with “virtual reality”.  As it does the market for this new GUI will grow. 

The best thing to do is not call binocular vision GUI VR at all, although unfortunately that ship may have sailed.  In part, that is a result of VR being taken up by gamers in the 90’s when it was abandoned by everyone else.  Of course, and rightly so, the gamers wanted a more “real” experience and one of the possibilities of this new GUI was to expand the experience of being “in a place”.  That has gotten us to where we are now, but the end game here is not the replication of reality, but the development of a new interface between humans and computers.  The recreation of reality is just one possibility of this new interface.

360 3D display

Owning a home computer was once nerdy territory and working with them was a frustrating experience even for those who knew how to deal with them.  Who would want that in their home?  But you could play games on them.  Now everyone has a computer as a phone in their pocket and many seem lost without one.  People say the same about VR goggles—uncomfortable, nerdy, difficult to work with.  The way out of that moment is to stop focusing on the recreation of reality and begin thinking of possibilities of new interactions with the machines we build.

Getting stuck in the recreation of reality trap creates a limited bandwidth of possibility for this new tech and should be avoided.

VR and Catharsis

What are we after in VR, movies, storytelling in general? At its best, storytelling is transformational.  And a powerful way to that transformation is the emotional charge of catharsis, built through an escalation of emotional tension in the audience. But it is the experience of the storytelling that gets you there, not experiencing the hero’s journey personally as you would in VR.

The safety of cinematic peril

One reason for narrative fatigue in VR products is that it is difficult to engage the viewer emotionally in the same way the character is emotionally engaged.  The inner conflict driving the character doesn’t exist in the viewer—it’s not the viewer’s conflict—and they don’t want it to be.  Safe, cinematic peril is fear and safety all rolled into one and that’s what the audience wants.

In a 1986 article I discussed the use of “safe cinematic peril” to elicit emotional audience responses.  The simple version is audiences love feeling the fear of death while intellectually and physically not having to experience it.  The gag is to overwhelm the intellectual and physical with pure emotion.  Audiences are delighted because they know they are smart enough not be in danger, yet are fooled into a momentary reaction.  This is done through projection of the audience onto the hero which is easier when they are distanced from that character and their situation.

VR can still support a storytelling roll, but how the audience follows and why, is certainly changing.

In VR it’s not just Tom Cruise hanging over the street a hundred stories up—it’s Tom and you.  And that’s not all—now there is confusion as to who is the hero, you or Tom?  I’m using action as an example because the case is much more foregrounded than a genre like drama.  The corollary to be aware of is: the more the audience feels “in the scene” the less important the “hero” becomes—but the hero is functioning as the character that makes the choice you would never make, thus giving you the emotional charge without the danger.

Here’s the other thing: if Tom jumps, so do you because Tom is driving the story.  Will audiences jump off with him once they become accustomed to not dying in VR, no matter what they do?

To experience those events along with the character, might induce a heart attack at worst, at minimum the loss of some sort of bodily fluid.  Furthermore, if the storytelling is good, the character who goes through the action “for real” might only have a small cathartic release at the end, while the audience’s catharsis is massive.  How does one generate catharsis where death is at stake for the character, but not the viewer, yet the viewer feels they are part of the moment?