Virtual Reality: How it’s used and why it matters
By Adam Hersko-RonaTas
We’ve supposedly arrived. With each additional chapter in this ongoing saga of developing media, we strive to draw our audience further into the stories we construct. Today you can slide a headset over your eyes, adjust your headphones, and find yourself visually and auditorily transported into a digital environment. In our cultural consciousness of visual media, virtual reality (VR) has been the ultimate pursuit. Now we’re here.
Even though the hype around VR technology has existed since the ’80s, only in the past two or so years has a consumable version of this tech come to light. Difficult to ignore as it has rapidly gained traction in the past year, VR is also a medium difficult to define. Capitalizing on the excitement surrounding the proliferation of mainstream VR, countless producers have begun to brand products as “VR” content despite loose, if any, agreed-upon understanding of what constitutes it. Sometimes your view is bound by a 360° projected sphere that envelops your entire field-of-view, anchoring you to the position the camera was placed. Sometimes your position is being tracked so that your visual input matches your bodily movements in a room-scale, XYZ plane. Sometimes, depending on where you point your head, directional gaze will influence how the visuals unfold using clever eye-tracking algorithms and lots of forward planning on the director’s part. And other times, you’re simply watching a moving panorama in your internet browser that you manually spin with your mouse. These have all been cast under the wide umbrella that is “VR.”
So VR is “here.” Naysayers will bemoan this new medium’s immersive quality as something that will rapture the coming generation. But just like with television (or even the advent of print), we see that the world adapted and progressed as a result of its inception. Of course this doesn’t mean we should overlook the obvious ethical implications of virtual reality (i.e. How do we mediate trauma when the sensations within the experience are so salient?) and its addictive qualities, but the medium’s positive potential currently seems to outweigh its disadvantages.
VR’s applications are seemingly limitless: from therapy to entertainment, from training to architectural design. However, as with most novelties, we’re quick to attribute value long before it has even safely crossed the technological “chasm” — the gap between early idealistic consumers and their mainstream successors in adopting new technologies. While we can assume that live-event documentation, real estate, and education have a future hand-in-hand with virtual — and augmented — reality, a large question remains as to how the medium can be used to tell stories that engage the viewer. The buzzword in the virtual reality world is “presence.” Instant immersion: just add water.
And we do. Storytellers have been pouring sweat and tears into producing VR content at various levels for head-mounted displays, attempting to translate the visual language of existing genres into this new format. Some have taken a crack at classic cinema (see Mini Cooper’s sponsored ‘noir’ drama shorts “Blackwater” and “Real Memories”) while others milk its potential for video games where the protagonist is afforded an additional dimension of realism in his ability to move his head and arms in the virtual space (see Wevr’s — a virtual reality production company in Venice Beach that I worked for this summer — “Gnomes & Goblins”).
One reasonable fear is that a new medium like VR threatens traditional video’s — or “flatties” as my Wevr coworker affectionately dubbed 2D video — position as the most moving storytelling platform. Valentijn Visch, Ed Tan and Dylan Molenaar, University of Delft and the University of Amsterdam researchers who study the intersection of cognition and film, argue that highly immersive cinema makes its impact simply through arousal, a very basic dimension of emotion. At eliciting an arousal response, VR is king. Instead of becoming the chief platform for storytelling, however, VR should be welcomed as a supplementary medium.
This sort of oversaturation of new media allows for traditional media platforms to hone their strengths. Film can focus on what it does best: painting a frame, directing attention, capturing subtlety in an actor’s face. VR diffuses the growing demand for fully immersive cinematic experiences, but obviously takes some physical effort. People often choose to see movies for the passivity.
Moreover, it is important to consider what stories are and are not worth sharing in VR. In what is already a compelling film, the additional x-number of degrees surrounding the viewer are likely extraneous. This summer I tried to better understand what works and what doesn’t in 360 storytelling while directing a VR short film. I saw it as an opportunity to experiment with camera placement and attention-guidance in the visual sphere. I found that I couldn’t move the camera quite the same way as I do when normally directing photography. If I started spinning or moving erratically/quickly, it made viewers sick; they lack the frame of reference they’d otherwise have when sitting in a theater, the screen anchored in an otherwise stationary space. Due to the technological constraints of stitching a full panorama, we must find alternatives to zooming. Classical editing conventions are abandoned as VR editors reduce the number of cuts and ease transitions so viewers can gain a sense of the space at their own pace. Also, because the viewer is directly deposited in the scene they are watching, some narrative questions arise. Is the viewer a character? Do we acknowledge them in the scene? Are they just a fly on the wall?
These narrative concerns for what “presence” does for the viewer are moot, however, if the headsets are not widely available. Creators have little control over how their content is viewed, scrambling to account for the infinite variability of screens around the world. Unfortunately, unlike film, VR is not easily screened for an audience. It is a uniquely personal experience whose dissemination calls for arcade-like constructions versus theaters. For VR, there is no reliable standard. Screens are ubiquitous, from personal devices to stores to buses. Popup VR exhibitions are still a rarity.
The discrepancy between how film and VR is consumed will continue in large part because in virtual reality, once you’re in — you’re in. The television viewer could keep his or her eyes on the stove as he or she watched the evening news. In virtual reality, the viewer must fully commit to the experience. By serving input directly into the sensory organs we rely on most to discern space (the eyes and ears), we’ve [virtually] removed ourselves from the world around us. Books, similarly, require their audience to devote a greater cognitive load than television.. Human brains require higher-level semantic processing to keep attention locked onto the page of a book. VR is a little less delicate; viewers are physically captive to sensory modalities.
So this allocation of attention could be seen as being still more passive than a book but more active than television: the information is being channeled directly to the viewer. What it lacks in freedom for imagination, however, VR makes up for in cogency. The agency and spatial cues (both visual and auditory) that it harnesses are pretty damn convincing.
So until everyone has their own, easily-accessible, affordable, high-quality headmounted display, the opportunities to share these virtual stories in their intended form will remain largely isolated within the community generating the excitement around this medium in the first place. With YouTube and Facebook pushing for content to share in their respective 360 players, the internet has seen a large upsurge in 360-videos, most of which are viewed on computer screens. Google’s Cardboard — an inexpensive, foldable, cardboard headset that utilizes the user’s smartphone — has opened this medium to the masses. Vive and Oculus offer room scale virtual reality head-mounted displays, but require hefty computers and several external components for tracking. Cardboard remains the carousel to Vive and Oculus’ rollercoaster.
As always, organizations based around digital storytelling are looking to remain one step ahead of consumer trend. There are dozens of platforms competing to become the “Netflix” of virtual reality content, like Wevr’s aptly named Transport. Most mid-tier and large film festivals are clamoring to include new media exhibitions as a part of their programming. This January at Sundance Film Festival, the New Frontier exhibition highlighted many forms of interactive media. The showstopper, without a doubt, was the collection of Oculus and Vive experiences, with Cardboards being issued to attendees like candy.
Proponents of this technology love hearing it labeled the “empathy machine.” And admittedly it does offer an unprecedented look into the literal point-of-view of other people and their experiences. Historically, storytellers could only convey these experiences in unfairly specific terms when words and curated imagery (moving and static) were their primary tools. But now we can take a step back, offering audiences less guidance and more agency while consuming these stories. Sans clever framing or rich adjectives to bias the viewer, he or she becomes the arbiter.
A healthy dose of skepticism is always in order. Each new iteration of visual technology brings with it the assumption that we’ve somehow mastered one phase and are moving on to the next, a phase that is closer to some nebulous idea of what we believe immersive narratives should ultimately achieve. Are we moving closer to simulating our own reality in order to most convincingly share any story? Maybe. But each new medium offers the opportunity to tell stories formerly untold using a different facet of storytelling. Consumers constantly subvert and alter the standard of every medium they inherit. Chances are this cycle will continue.
Diagram of Apple’s patent for a VR headset — photo courtesy of Apple
