Finding the Volumetric Content Greenlight Zone
Today at 8i, we’re announcing our plans to launch Holo, a consumer mobile app that allows people to interact with our holograms in their own environments, and record and share the video experiences they create. We’re excited about the potential for Holo to engage a new generation of audience, given trends in content creation and consumption we’ve all been witnessing since the iPhone put a video camera in everyone’s pocket in 2007 and platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat gave us all free and easy video distribution. This is an exciting time for our company and for 3D computing in general, as people begin to experiment with augmented and mixed reality by putting moving, realistic 3D digital objects into our real life environments.
Our investment into mobile AR in no way diminishes our excitement for the many use cases that are emerging for our holograms in high end VR. What we are seeing are different kind of content creators embracing different forms of content for different consumption platforms. To illustrate why that is the case, we need to consider the nature of the current content marketplace and examine the way content gets the “greenlight” for production.
Content Return on Investment
Companies, people, creators, even artists calculate ROI before they produce content, either implicitly or explicitly. ROI is defined by value divided by cost. Value can be defined many ways, most commonly by sales but not always. Cost is the price to produce the content. Content that has the potential to garner enough value for the right cost enters the Greenlight Zone and gets made.
For media projects, value is usually a function of reach. Without sufficient reach to the right audience, a media project is not greenlit for production.
Content ROI in emerging platforms
In 2011 when YouTube began to explode onto the scene, we saw a large amount of dissonance among the media cognoscenti. Who was watching all this weird new low production value content? (Lots of people, mostly teens and tweens) Could you make money with it? (yes) In this case all 3 aspects of the ROI calculation were dramatically altered to create a whole new class of content that was suddenly in the Greenlight Zone. In exchange for a small investment in production a large audience could be reached. Though the audience was viewing the content for free, they were valuable to advertisers, who subsidized the cost of content by investing in larger and larger media projects.
The three key factors defining the Greenlight Zone include reach, value and cost:
Reach: massive audience delivered by YouTube, cord cutting, and content snacking trends
Value: social and/or cold hard capital accruing to creators who garnered large followings on the platform
Cost: an order of magnitude decrease in video production costs from digital cameras and personal video editing tools
This exciting ecosystem is still changing and expanding as new platform entrants like FaceBook and Snapchat alter the Reach and Benefit equations.
The newest emerging platform is 3D computing
Thinking about AR or VR as monolithic content types is misleading. They are actually subgroups of a larger category called 3D computing. You already know what 3D computing is from Sci-fi, you’ve seen the holodeck on the USS Enterprise and the hand-navigated UI on Minority Report. Loosely defined it’s the ability for devices to display content that has volume and track position in 3D space. As companies like Google, Facebook, HTC, Lenovo and countless others create systems and a range of devices that use lasers and cameras and accelerometers to track themselves positionally, content can begin to move beyond 2D to have true depth and volume. This ability is enabling an explosion of new use cases for content, from lightweight experiences like 360 video and Pokemon GO to fully immersive VR storytelling and gameplay.
While the presence of YouTube enabled a single new category of content, in 3D computing we are seeing many new categories of content move into the Greenlight Zone all at once.
Mobile AR
The success of the smash hit Pokemon GO — which showed us that mobile phones offer a lot of features that make them good AR devices such as GPS, accelerometers, powerful cameras, and increasingly powerful processors — is driving creators to experiment with apps that can put 3D content into world around you. While Google’s Project Tango is the emerging platform here, enabling next generation mobile devices, like Lenovo’s Phab2 Pro, to perceive depth and surfaces and understand how a user is moving through the real world, all smartphones have basic AR capabilities.
Mobile VR
By now millions of people have experienced mobile VR, which is characterized by 3 degrees of freedom, meaning your head is on a swivel but you can’t really move around. This category of content includes 360 video and some lightweight games. Although not fully immersive, this content has set the stage for the type of storytelling and interactivity that is yet to come. Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR are examples of these platforms.
For both mobile AR and VR, the types of content that are possible are primarily constrained by the power of the hardware itself. Processing power, numbers of cameras and external sensors that hardware companies select will dictate what is possible for many years to come. To that end, we can expect the value of content that can be created to increase as these devices become more powerful.
Head Mounted Display AR
Today the closest analogue to Minority Report or the Star Trek Holodeck, is the experience an HMD AR device affords the user, with 6 degrees of freedom to interact with 3D assets in the real world. While this type of 3D computing might ultimately have the most promise, it is the hardest to build and has been experienced to date by the fewest people. Microsoft Hololens is the most well known of these platforms.
Head Mounted Display VR
The most immersive of the 3D computing mediums offering a full 6 degree of freedom is enabled by HMD VR which gives you a sense of presence in a place that exists only in the digital world. If you are fighting zombies on Mars or walking across a rope bridge over a chasm high in the Andes, you are likely in an HMD VR setup such as HTC Vive or Sony Playstation VR.
In the case of the high end HMD systems, as the hardware becomes more affordable and less “awkward”, more consumers will adopt it and increase the reach for the high value content.
Decreasing content costs will also drive adoption
In addition to better and more affordable consumption devices, our industry will also benefit from a very steeply declining production cost curve. Making good volumetric content is hard for many reasons such as underdeveloped tools, lack of experienced creators, and uncertainty around business models. Many companies are creating the necessary infrastructure, building the authoring and hosting platforms, tackling monetization, etc. At 8i we’re working hard to make capturing human performances as easy in volumetric as it is using flat video. As production costs plummet and reach increases, we’ll see more innovative and thrilling content get made, which will drive adoption and accelerate growth of the Greenlight Zone.
