Inner Worlds VI: Anrick Bregman, the VR director
On technology, immersion, and ethics of virtual reality
The rise of video games ignited a revolution in world-building and storytelling. It opened imagined worlds for exploration. This led to creation of digital universes existing solely for that purpose — like Space Engine or No Man’s Sky — and gave players tools to create their own worlds, from Minecraft to The Sims.
It all happened so quickly and yet another revolution is already looming ahead, brought about by virtual reality. Too soon, you say? I used to be a VR skeptic, too. Why would I wear a heavy, vomit-inducing headset when all I want is to play a game? I would ask the enthusiasts. Try it, they replied. So I did.
In early 2014 I got to test a pre-release version of Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Even though the graphics in the demo were not even close to realism, it felt real. I remember the joy of free falling through the virtual air, then the sting of fear and an awkward jerk of my body when I hit the pixelated ground. In almost 20 years of playing video games, I haven’t been that immersed. That moment I became a VR believer. And there is plenty of others: Google is investing in VR, Facebook actually acquired the company behind Oculus Rift for $2B, and Sony has released a VR headset for PlayStation.
I sat down with Anrick Bregman, a film director and game designer who has been working with virtual reality for the past couple of years. The plan was to discuss what the rise of VR brings to the table for world-building but it quickly turned into a conversation about VR and society at large. Because if we could create any virtual world that is perfectly believable to our senses… would we ever want to come back? How will our biases and prejudices affect the VR worlds we create? And is all that plausible, or just a futurist’s dream that needs a reality check?
Anrick is first to admit that no one has these answers yet. But we might need them sooner than many would think.
Wojtek Borowicz: You’re an artist and a director. What does world-building mean to you and how, if at all, it differs from storytelling?
Anrick Bregman: You can approach world-building from two directions. Either build the world out of a story or do the opposite. I worked with Alex McDowell, whose technique is to build a world for a story to be written inside of. In both cases there is a link to storytelling, it just depends which direction you take.
I’ve also been thinking recently about world-building in context of film acting. What an actor does is world-building as well. It’s building the world of a character so that anywhere the character goes, they know exactly how that character would behave.
Humans first attempted world-building with myth. Then we had pictures, then writing. After centuries we came up with motion picture and digital, interactive arts. Is VR the next frontier?
I don’t think of VR as the evolution of film or games because although it emerged from those formats, it’s not replacing them. I love films, I love books, I love games and all forms of entertainment and storytelling. They’re as relevant today as they always have been and VR is simply a new one.
I think of it as a tree branch. There is a storytelling tree and, for example, one of the branches is filmmaking. From the main branch of filmmaking there are many others that branch out even further. Virtual reality has just started to grow and there are a few twigs already coming off of it. It will continue to grow and will become another strong branch, just like filmmaking and literature.
How did you get into VR?
As a kid I was always reading science fiction. There was a series of books called Otherland that focused on the idea of computer-generated spaces. It also dealt with a lot of issues around morality and ethics in fantasy spaces. I loved these books and they made me think a lot about what does it mean to have a virtual world. What’s the limit, what’s allowed? Otherland was the first time I experienced virtual reality even though I read it as a book.
Much later, in recent years, virtual reality started influencing the field I work in. I used to make websites and interactive films and virtual reality has been a massive commercial opportunity in the last three or four years. It’s a natural evolution of my interactive filmmaking.
VR has indeed exploded commercially. Aren’t you afraid it will turn out to be a fad?
I don’t think VR is a fad, but the headsets of today and the content of today are. They will be replaced by newer versions that really capture what makes people passionate about films and games. The technology will change fundamentally. But films are here and they’re not going away. Games are here and they’re not going away. And VR is an amazing mixture of both. It’s strengthened by the existing audiences of films and games.
And I haven’t yet talked about the social side. Today it’s necessary for me to fly to Los Angeles for meetings, but in a few years, maybe not. Virtual reality has a lot of potential in a lot of different spaces.
We keep talking about games and films. Are your works with VR one or the other, something in between, or something completely different?
They’re definitely one or the other for now. 360° films, which are still considered VR even though it’s kind of controversial, are films that just happen to play out all around you. And you are inside the film instead of looking at it through a frame. VR games are definitely games, too. But we’ll see a merging of those two. You’re gonna apply what makes a film great — the realness of scenes that don’t happen in your audience’s backyard — to a game engine, in order to allow the viewer to move, walk, and explore. That’s the future of VR. The perfect mixture of films and games.
VR is still focused on visual and spatial experience. Do you see it encompassing other senses in the future?
Probably. It would certainly make it more compelling but it’s a barrier to distributing VR. It’s about the cost of making it and, most importantly, the cost of having it at home or experiencing it. If you want to show a VR experience that’s only sight and sound to 50 people, you can line them up and go one by one. It will take maybe 45 minutes. If everybody has to put on a full suit to feel VR, or put a helmet on to smell VR, it takes much more time and equipment.
360° VR is the most popular even though it’s regarded as VR light or the Diet Coke of VR — like not real VR. But the many people can experience it with little effort. They just need to use their Samsung Gear or even their phone. Headset VR, on the other hand, requires you to buy an Oculus Rift and a $3,000 PC. That’s a huge amount of money, so very few people have it. That would be more so if you had to buy a whole suit. Also, most people don’t want to make a massive effort for their entertainment.
And does more immersive entertainment mean better entertainment?
I don’t necessarily think so. There is a gradient of what you want to do. If I had a really long day, I’m gonna jump into something lighter or watch something lighter. And maybe on Sunday, when I have nothing to do, I will spend the whole afternoon in a full bodysuit. Very different experiences and a different level of investment from me. Both have a use and it just depends on the situation.
Isn’t there a risk of a total immersion being total escapism: literally cutting yourself away from the physical world?
We do that already. We seek escapism in our lives. I remember being a kid and reading books until late, looking at a watch and realizing it’s been two hours even though it felt like 10 minutes. The brain has an immense capacity for imagination and it can block out the world just because of the words on a page.
We can discuss game addiction and internet addiction: there’s a famous story about couple and their baby who died while they were playing games. And there will probably be virtual reality addicts that will need to be helped and supported. That’s scary, but this is a human problem, not a technology problem. I don’t want to make it seem lighter than it is, but responsible people with a healthy outlook on how they consume entertainment are going to love escapism.
If you created a virtual world people don’t want to come back from — as an artist, would you be more satisfied or terrified?
Probably a bit of both. The game I’m working on now, Storm, is the opposite. It’s about an environment that would kill you. Not wanting to leave a snowstorm seems unlikely but this is a big subject. It would frighten me to have created something that makes people do things that are unhealthy for them. There is a responsibility to creating content. But, you know, I live a fairly privileged life. I have the freedom many people don’t have. Many people might have a much better life in virtual reality than they have in the real world. That could be amazing and it would make me proud. But we would still need to address the real world problems they are facing, and hopefully fix them too.
I don’t think there is anybody right now who can make a clear conclusion. It goes beyond virtual reality, beyond entertainment and technology. It’s a question of society: how can someone be so unhappy that they want to spend the rest of their life in a virtual world? But the freedom virtual reality offers, to be anything you want, to fly, to be of different gender, all those things are positive and beautiful.
Ray Kurzweil touches upon this in his book, The Singularity Is Near. He writes about a future where we have mastered technology to the point of creating any virtual world we want. In his vision, we would immerse ourselves in these virtual realities to escape the confines of human body. Do you find that vision compelling?
I do find the idea very compelling. That’s from entertainment perspective, from educational perspective, from medical perspective, there’s a lot of applications. For example, think of people with limited mobility, who would be able to enjoy their lives more. VR will make the future better, generally speaking, but there will definitely be issues that we need to resolve. There will be challenges and big, big risks.
It brings me back to Otherland and I’m thinking a lot about the implications. Rich people will be able to spend more money on their virtual worlds, so they’ll be better or bigger. Our virtual worlds will also isolate us even more from opinions we don’t agree with and they will inhibit debate rather than encourage it. And we need to understand people different from us. Today more than ever. And I’m not sure virtual reality will allow us to do that effectively.
So if we can make the virtual worlds anything we want, we will just transplant our biases from the physical reality?
In the real world, you might sit in a cafe and hear a conversation between two people that have a very different opinion from you. Or you might go to a dinner party and meet somebody with a different opinion. If you go into a virtual world that’s full of characters that are mimicking you, because the machine knows you, that’s a limited experience in terms of confrontation and expanding your mind.
Is the VR community discussing these dilemmas?
These debates go beyond VR. Earlier today I saw an article about how Facebook creates bias by feeding you content that only reverberates your beliefs. The discussions are about the technology world we live in and the social space we live in. And they’re very passionate.
Liked that? Read other conversations about imagined universes at Inner Worlds.
