Sense of Scale—How to Remake the most Legendary Science Film in VR
One of the most influential movies I watched as a kid was Powers of Ten. The premise was simple, the camera starts on a shot of a young couple then every 10 seconds, the view expands to 10x the previous.
The film itself is only 9 minutes but it it’s hard to imagine just how many millions of kids this inspired to get into science. It takes abstract concepts about math, biology, and physics then stitches them together. It works because it plays to the unique advantages of the frame. Power of Ten uses a square to capture the motion but it also draws a frame inside the frame to establish a marker for distance.
The result is something that feels absolutely humungous but is still followable. At every level you have context and a linear sense of motion. The technique of the film matches the subject matter. You have one continuous arial shot, and in its wake, we see everything we know about where we come from. All the way to the edge.
We could remake this film with nicer graphics for YouTube and it would be cool but a new era gives us another opportunity that seems to fit the potential for this film even more. “Powers of Ten” in VR.
As someone with a filmmaking background, one thing I noticed immediately about VR is how humungous things seem inside of it. Those at Valve and VR creators like Ben Vance take advantage of this technique in much of their work.
The first Vive experience I ever tried, Robot Repair, saved this for the very end of the piece. After establishing a relatively small room, they room falls out from under you, the ceiling opens and reveals that you are in a much larger space.
It’s hard to convey with these screenshots but the effect is absolutely mesmerizing. It also operates by very different cinematic rules, as the user, not the cinematographer is who is in control of the frame.
In “Robot Repair”, the scale reveal isn’t interactive, it’s something that happens around you. This can be an effective way to do it but there are many other ways to interact with scale, and I’ve seen a number of them recently.
Shrinking
Micro to Macro Interaction (draw mountains)
Drag Enlarging
Hatching
Hatching is probably my favorite.
As far as experiences to make for VR, I can think of little else as challenging or rewarding as a remake of “Powers of 10”. The film uses the most elegant techniques of film to reveal something unforgettable about our place in the universe. It scrambled my brain as a kid and I can imagine how much its done the same for others.
I think it will be a while before we know enough about roomscale VR to create an experience that can have a similar effect, but the experiments in scale many are posting on Twitter are the rough draft of how we get there.
