What Early Film Can Teach Us About VR
Early works were an extension of either photography or theatre. Innovators like Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin helped lay the foundations for a cinematic grammar.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about virtual reality. I truly believe it is a technology that will revolutionize myriad facets of our lives. But the deeper I go into the industry, the more parallels I start to see with VR and the early film industry. In examining emerging media, especially those that will have an astounding impact, it is important to remember that no medium is created in a vacuum. Instead, when a new medium appears, it must always be understood in terms of previously existing media, before it can truly come into it’s own.
When film first arrived on the scene, we didn’t really know what to do with it. We knew how to use photography, we knew how to create theatre, but this incipient technology was foreign to us. Film is extremely weird. One second you’re looking at two people talking at a table, the next second you’re looking right into someone’s eye, the next you’re in the Sahara Desert. Real life isn’t like that. The closest thing we experience to that is dreams (which is a tangent I won’t get into for now). The reason we were able to get to that point of refinement was through a long process of cinematic theory and experimentation. Important innovators like Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin helped lay the foundations for a cinematic grammar, which in turn helped directors understand what the human mind could, and could not follow. One example of this grammar is the 180 degree rule, which states that two characters in a scene should maintain the same left/right relationship to each other, in other words, the camera should not cross an invisible 180 degree line. These rules are at times broken by directors, but are done so out of an awareness for the rule, and an understanding of the disorientation breaking them causes.
What is the “grammar” for VR? We still don’t actually know. While we’ve started to develop the foundations, there’s still a long way to go. It will be the job of future content creators and VR designers to uncover these rules, and have their implementation become widespread.
So how do you develop for a medium you still do not fully understand? The answer is this: you simply use it as an extension of media you do understand. Looking again at film, we see early works created either as an extension of photography (the camera is set in one place and used to document), or as an extension of theatre (the camera is set in one place, does not cut shots, and the actors merely perform in front of it).
We look back at these incipient films now, and shake our heads that early practitioners could not grasp the full potential of the medium, and yet we are living in similar circumstances today. VR at present is treated as either an extension of video games (wherein the gear merely acts as an external dongle to the Playstation or computer game), or as an extension of film (wherein a user simply sits down and gets to look around every so often).
This is not to dismiss the incredible work that has been done with VR thus far, but merely to point out that we are still in the early stages of VR development, that we are only beginning to understand what VR “is” outside of the media that have preceded it. The future certainly has exciting things in store for VR, especially for those who are able to utilize the lessons of the past.
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