Virtual Reality: The Next Frontier
“There’s not an industry that this isn’t going to touch,” — Mitch Gelman, Chief Technology Officer at the Newseum
There was a time when using virtual reality (“VR”) as a storytelling medium was little more than a pipe dream. These days, with huge strides in technology in the last few years, it is safe to say that this is no longer the case. We now live in a time when The New York Times has a full-time VR editor and team, VR earned its first academy award nomination, and is being projected to be the next billion dollar industry (and a trillion dollar one by 2035).
Mitch Gelman is the Chief Technology Officer at the Newseum, and co-authored a Knight Foundation report on VR and its future potential in March 2016. The report underscored that 2016 would be a pivotal year for VR growth, particularly in news and journalism. Gelman and I sat down last month at the Newseum to talk about VR and his optimism for the medium’s future. He believes it will only continue to scale up across a range of industries, given the falling costs associated with producing VR content.
Under Gelman’s leadership, the Newseum has worked to bring VR into the museum in different ways. Each month, a selection of the best VR content is put on display in the Newseum’s VR Lab, and the museum has featured VR exhibits that take visitors to Pearl Harbor and the Berlin Wall.
Below are some excerpts from our conversation on February 9th. Feel free to check out the full transcript.
On the four “levels” of virtual reality:
It starts with basic VR, entry-level which is 360-degree spherical video. You put a camera in a place and it captures the entire scene. It’s almost as though you as a person are standing there with eyes in the back of your head. An example here is The New York Times’ “Fight for Falluja.” The Newseum just shot something like this on Inauguration Day — both at the center of the protests, as well as at the center of the inaugural parade. The President’s inaugural address. It showed two perspectives of 180 seconds of America. This level of VR can be viewed in different ways: Facebook, with touch controls, touch screen, etc.
Or, this can be viewed in a headset that allows you to essentially look around and be more immersed in the experience. This forms the second level of VR.
The third level is what they refer to now as “room-scale”, or more immersive, walkaround VR. This is like the Pearl Harbor experience or Berlin Wall beta that the Newseum has been working on. This is best done with Oculus rift, touch controls, motion sensors, or through an HTC Vive system. It allows you to put on a headset and go inside a scene, move around inside it, and you can get closer to or further from, or walk around the 3D individuals or objects in the scene. That requires an amount of game development or unity development or unreal engine development that makes it much more immersive than just looking around a spherical video. This enables one to move around a room in 1941 and touch objects, or going to a scene when bombs are falling.
The last level is augmented reality (“AR”), which right now is a sort of sibling to VR. VR takes you and brings you into a virtual environment that removes you from the place you are in. AR brings the virtual experience into your world. It brings that into the place that you already exist in. So you can bring figures from history or basketball players, or anyone who has posed for or been modeled in a 360-degree hologram, you can bring them into your environment. The Newseum has been thinking about ways to bring Frederick Douglass or Rosa Parks or Woodward and Bernstein — heroes of the First Amendment — into mixed reality experiences that people can participate in.
The most successful attempt at this so far obviously was Pokemon Go — capturing little creatures in different places. But the same geo targeting and almost higher level geo locating of holograms can be used to tell stories through AR in ways that are only just beginning to be discovered.
On the stories that led themselves best to this medium:
Two types: the first is stories that benefit from your ability to be in a place you otherwise could not be in. Like Falluja. You probably are not going to be embedded with troops that are fighting ISIS any time soon. So we can travel there and have as realistic an experience as we want, with bullets flying by, without the risk of being hit by a bullet, with VR.
The second thing that works well in this medium is offering someone a point of view, or a perspective that they can’t necessarily experience themselves. It puts you into another person’s shoes. And allows you to move through an idea, an issue, a place with a perspective that you may not have been able to experience yourself.
So the two elements are: putting people in a place, and then providing a perspective are what work best. When the two can come together, then I think you have a very powerful use of the medium.
On what ties the best contemporary VR pieces together:
What ties them together is the opportunity to use emerging technology to tell stories, to communicate in new ways. If you go back to newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the internet, each of those mediums allowed you do something, in terms of how a story is presented, in a way that was unique and specific to that medium.
Now with VR technologies, you’re beginning to see the emergence of the next medium, and the stories that are told through these features are as unique and exciting and different and special as TV was from radio, as radio was from magazine, as magazines with their big photos were from print, and it pulls a lot of different elements together, so that’s why I’m attracted to the potential of what people are referring to as VR. When they are referring to VR, what they are really referring to is a variety of different types of technologies that allow you to tell stories in different ways. As of now, there’s really three or four levels of VR the way it’s being used in the vernacular. At the Newseum, we’ve been exploring all of those different levels.
On the other organizations that have a window of opportunity to use VR technology:
Travel, job training, the military and defense industry who have been using it for a long time and are continuing to. Nonprofits and advocacy groups too — any space where creating an emotional connection with an issue or idea can be helpful. It is a powerful use of the medium. Education is another field in which people are making great strides into this.
The government has had some programs recently in which they have tried to fund the use of VR and AR to provide better experiences, more training and opportunity for people, particularly women and diverse populations to benefit from STEM areas. So they’ve been looking at science, technology, engineering, medicine and really diving in and using VR to bring people into those environments to help them get experience that they otherwise may not have had a chance to have. If you look at Google Earth has done for the Vive recently, through which you can travel places, you can see the new realities that are going to be available for people to experience. It’s a very fast-moving field.
Sports is another big potential area for immersion — bringing people places where they can’t necessarily go otherwise: courtside seats at a basketball game, or even into the huddle at a football game. A lot of these are continuing to evolve, and there’s a great deal of experimentation being done to see what works most effectively.
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