Virtual reality tech: Where are you rushing to in this evil madness?
Hyper-realism and the virtual reality gap
“Where, where are you rushing to in this evil madness.” — Horace
This article is in response to the response Music & VR: what to keep in mind by Bas Grasmayer’s from his excellent post, “Virtual Reality: Music’s Next Frontier”. It also in response to another post by VR expert Gentry Lane’s post here on Medium, The VR Industry Is About to Make a Serious Mistake and to rewind.co list of requirements to enter the VR industry in the article, How to break into the VR industry.
I would like to explore that issue a bit more:
I think we tend to write some posts that lean slightly in the direction of VR hype. There are a few words of caution thrown left and right, but there is something missing from these responses.
When I wrote the response Bas, I was hoping to focus a bit more on the mid-point. Not the “get better and catch up” point.
You said:
Virtual reality is demanding. People like passive entertainment, because it’s casual, so when you demand full attention, you need to make sure your experience deserves it.
I agree with you that ‘presentation’ is vital and that answers the bullet point in the post about passivity. But, the use of the word ‘deserves’ is a bit subjective. It is somewhat akin to when music industry buffs say to musicians: “make better music” to get heard (though quite true in many cases), it really doesn’t represent the situation holistically— we all know the stories of talented musicians with excellent songs who are never discovered for a variety of reasons.
I feel we rushed through this. Especially with the last paragraph, you said:
“It’s also new terrain. When entering unexplored terrain, it’s not unlikely you’ll step into something you really don’t want to be stepping into. But shit happens. Embrace it as a learning experience and make a resolution to develop even better experiences in the future.”
This sounds good but again it is advice to ‘make a better experience’.
What is VR?
Maybe it might be valuable to take a moment to define terms since VR is a new language and also to define what is VR intending to become.
On the more conceptual part of the equation is VR leaning towards - hyper-realism, photo-realism or maybe abstract conceptualism? Is VR film, fine art, a game, a tool, a technology, an immersive experience…or all or none of the above? Surely, it is all of the above - it is made with human hands and defined by a human mind, isn’t it?
So, maybe we might pause a second before “we boldly go where no man has gone before” and consider a few things.
Mobile apps
Remember when mobile apps first came out and were all the rage?
Mobile apps were ‘the next best thing’. Few could enter in the beginning or even get through the 600 pages of Objective-C to make them. It cost thousands of dollars to make an app. I remember saying to myself back then, if I wait 2 years, there will be an app to build an app and sure enough there are thousands now.
Apps walled off connectivity in the beginning, in the same way as a country’s borders wall off our world.
As app ideas ran out, mashups appeared and then everyone scrambled to make telephone lines with APIs and JSONs. Making an API is a bit technical but the real issue is its information is controlled by its “gatekeeper”. Apps like countries again are “wall-gardens” and truly almost killed off the internet.
You can’t search through apps yet and truth is you can hardly search the App Store to find them.
And isn’t it funny now how you ‘sort of’ need a PC to enjoy VR to the fullest. Oh, and how many are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to make a “surfable/indexable” VR world.
Plato said, “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” This didn’t mean we have to make a great impression from the start. It meant that what we give young people at a time where they are most impressionable is important.
If VR is left to the few from the beginning, it will be those technologies that will be the most indelible in people’s minds. So what is the message? Become more hyper-realistic? Have a better shooter game with carefully placed ads for McDonalds? Who is going to decide?
The internet
You know why the internet was so beautiful? This quote from the Wall Street Journal sums it up:
I think the Web was a historical accident, an anomalous instance of a powerful new technology going almost directly from a publicly funded research lab to the public. It caught existing juggernauts like Microsoft flat-footed, and it led to the kind of disruption today’s most powerful tech companies would prefer to avoid.
It went straight into the hands of the public didn’t it? Unlike the gate-keeper-kept-walled-app-world with APIs that send us ‘invisible services straight to our smartphones’. Apps that know our needs before we do, serving us Big data prepared “ready-made” services -numbing us into auto-loaded complacency, with limp and flaccid creativity muscles, children with unformed neural networks, in a world we can’t learn the tech fast enough to be part of.
And possibly VR, if it’s hyper-realistic leanings create a gap with no bridge or even worse a bridge built by marketeers who might even further wall us into an even more Big Data fed, “all your needs met” world.
It won’t be that frightening though if we all could participate in its creation.
When I wrote about the ‘hack’ to make a 360 video on After Effects with zero budget. There were quite a few emails and PMs. Mostly, from developers who used AE. I noticed most were from countries somewhat third world like Greece where I live; devs who at one time or another get access to high tech, or a couple extra RAM or DIY their own super computers.
There are many hungry developers, even those without tech and the expensive headsets or PCs that want to be creators in the VR space and use the new medium. They want to play as well and are looking for simple ways to do it.
And even Google with it’s Cardboard kindly said you can start to play and be creative and sent out a cutout.
So, how did we get from point #1 — enjoying our new creative medium to having to spend $1000s on camera and PCs and expensive headsets. Why do we need PhDs in advanced storytelling and gaming? As if VR=Realism/Hyperrealism, rather than slowly adjusting to a new medium of more “immersive experience”. Why can’t we Dribble VR?
What’s the rush..this time?
Can’t we slow down a bit on the one hand and have the high-tech VRs hype the hyper-realism for gamers and filmmakers on the other?
The ‘tone’ for now, as it appears is “in order to sell this new tech” (so possibly later it can be cheap and accessible to everyone) is to first approach the most likely-to-buy-headsets crowd. Obviously, the gamer world was a good place to start.
But, gamers and the gamer super-stars have pretty high standards, they have been graphics-spoiled for decades.
I think the solution of trying to satisfy the “hyper-realistic” immersive experience of the high graphic-tolerance gamers is what is going to create a dangerous gap between the public and the new tech.
A gap that the “gate-keepers” will manipulate.
And it was very disheartening to hear:
“Right now, I think VR music experiences work best for artists with audiences with a highly tech savvy component, like Run the Jewels or Grimecraft, or when specifically targeted to VR communities. There are numerous groups and communities on Facebook, Reddit and Slack, all eager to check out new things to do with the medium.”
Musicians shouldn’t do VR if they don’t have a tech savvy fanbase? Reddit and Slack for a musician’s fanbase? More “closed walled” communities with weird rules. Hmm.
I would like to amplify the muffled voice of a mainstream creator.
For a writer, a pen and paper is all he really needs in order to create, and that hasn’t changed much all these years.
For a fine artist, he needs a piece of carbon and paper and maybe the juice of beets so she can paint.
There are ways of building immersive with only an idea in your mind and an photo and video editing program and a few plugins.
May we pause a bit before rushing into the big sell arena saying “get better at it and you can participate”. Maybe even using a bit of the energy
to figure out how to get people doing it (without shame) on their computers right now. Maybe even congratulate them on their first VR cave drawings in immersive (giving and sharing a few “wows and ahhhs” for each others small triumph). Won’t that also make the public more willing to “buy” the high tech stuff in the future because they can participate as well?
It was a bit shocking to read rewind.co article, How to break into the VR industry and the list of requirements to work in “their two distinct types of VR”. Now there are industry requirements and a skill set. All involve high-end technical cameras and/or be masters in 3D game development. I don’t think this is absolutely true and is misleading to newcomers in the industry.
Remember the first websites on the internet? I do. Everyone helped out everyone with tips on how to build one.
And they were amazing and it was beautiful experience of “discovery”.
Let’s talk about bridging the gap sometime or should devs all just sit back passively for the 1% high tech innovators to show us where the button to the Holodeck in our living rooms are?
