You’re going to love this.

When was the last time you queued up for something? A new Apple product? Hamilton tickets? A celebrity photo opportunity at a convention or signing?
The very fact that you’ve queued up to get you hands on something indicates that you’re already excited about it, but there’s a very good chance you’ve never experienced it before. For most people this is very likely true of VR, AR and MR devices. In the new immersive mediums the experience doesn’t just start when you put on the headset, it starts when you first meet the brand ambassador. How they present and prepare you for the experience to come is of paramount importance. Explanation of the content, technology, experience and mechanics involved will all aid in crafting an enjoyable and memorable experience. Failure to do these basic preparatory steps can lead to feelings of disorientation, shock, a bitter taste in the mouth afterwards.
I’ve lost count of the number of times over the last year or four I’ve been offered a VR headset at a conference, trade show or another event with almost no preamble, content warning of what you’re about to see, or even basic explanation of the technology. So often I’m just told that I’m going to “love it” before having a headset roughly shoved on my face. The major content producers and hardware manufacturers usually have well trained demo staff, but even these staff can revert to “Here put this on”. I understand the pains of endless demos, but we have to ensure that standards are maintained as we’re the visible face of the industry for most people.
Now, in reality (sorry), I’ve tried a lot of VR experiences and at REWIND we have built content for almost every AR/VR/MR device or headset currently out there (and some not!) and I have had adverse reactions to content that’s not been telegraphed correctly, but I represent an edge case user in most of these spaces and there are still a lot of people out there who have never tried a True VR (real-time driven) experience.
In a True VR experience, you should have presence, agency, a reason for being there. When trying an experience that ticks all these boxes you’re immersed, taken away from your reality and transported to wherever the content creator has decided that they want to take you. This places the responsibility squarely on us, the content creators, to be mindful of the types of experiences we’re creating and how we’re presenting them to the people who try them. In addition to a duty to help educate and guide the brands, agencies and partners we work with to ensure that both the messaging and end users are considered from the outset.
As our experiences become more immersive, resolutions increase, headsets get lighter, interaction mechanics more natural, the experiences get closer to our experience of the real world. Adding things like eye tracking for foveated rendering and dynamic depth of field inside real-time engines will mean that the picture we’re shown on the screen will increasingly like what our eyes see in the reality of our day to day lives. As the divide between the real world and virtual world gets narrower and more tenuous our brains are going to have more trouble differentiating experiences in one from the other. Session memories of VR experiences will be created that will be recalled by our subconscious in the same way it takes inspiration from the real world to craft our dreams.
In most previous narrative forms we have been kept separate from the content we’re experiencing: it’s on the stage, the screen, inside the frame, on the page. While the memories of the previous media stay with us, they stay with us as something we were shown, told, something we watched. Not something that “happened” to us. The work of Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski in theatre began to push audiences from passively watching a play to being involved, in the action, immersed? The new media driven by immersive technologies takes a lot from the language and practices of theatre writers and directors to help us craft and create experiences that involve us and immerse us. In the near future, it’s my worry that someone will create an experience that is so jarring that it will have a profoundly negative and lifelong effect on someone’s memory.
The NHS lists these as some of the types of events that are potential causes for post-traumatic stress disorder: serious road accidents, witnessing violent deaths, military combat, being held hostage, natural disasters. Most of these are subjects that VR experiences are being used to create/recreate. As currently, there is no agreed rating system for immersive content, let alone a standardised way of talking about the sort of content we are created. One studio’s definitions vary from another’s. We are borrowing terminology from the film industry, the world of video games and a whole lot from theatre, but the application and meaning of the terms are often being re-applied in a sense that doesn’t actually fit. I think experiences should be rated for locomotion mechanic and vestibular comfort as well as the more traditional ratings that the MPAA and BBFC use for discrimination, horror, language, imitable behaviour, drugs, nudity, sex, sexual violence, context, tone and impact of an experience. The relevant warnings should be explained in an easy to understand way prior to starting an experience.
Which brings me back to demoing. As content creators and demonstrators we have a duty of care to explain to our users what it is they are about to experience, how the technology works, what to do if they want to stop. Back in the early days of VR roller coasters and the Oculus Rift DK1 I sat in an office in central London and watched a woman with a fear of heights, who insisted she wanted to try the ride regardless, scream at the first drop and reach up to cover her eyes as she would on a real roller coaster, to get away from what she was seeing. But because she was wearing a headset, all she did was cover the front of the device. Her eyes were still exposed to the images. We had taken away one of our most natural defence mechanisms to things we’re not comfortable with. It is not good enough to just say “If you don’t like it just close your eyes”.
We give warnings on TV before showing programs that contain images that viewers may find disturbing. So why don’t we do the same in immersive media? Research from the University of Cambridge in 2011 concluded that from an early age our natural reaction to things that scare us or that we want to escape from is to cover our eyes, rendering us ‘invisible’. (Reference “Why Do Young Children Hide by Closing Their Eyes? Self-Visibility and the Developing Concept of Self” Russell, Gee and Bullard, 2011). This behavior is integral to our idea of self and self preservation. When we take away a fundamental ability to remove ourselves from a distressing moment we are forcing people to endure an experience way more than would be true in the real world, we are removing an ability ingrained in us from our early years to control our experience of the world.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers to what we as content creators need to do to ensure that our experiences are enjoyed and demonstrated appropriately, but we do need to start having those conversations with each other, our brands and partners and most of all our demo staff. For many people, their first taste of the current wave of VR or MR experiences will most likely be at our hands in a digital out of home marketing space or a trade show. So the duty falls to us to ensure that their first experience is a good one, because if we fail in that regard we run the risk of putting people off the medium for life.