Analogies, history, and innovation: thinking about thinking about VR
Analogies are powerful, but they can be dangerous. Those working in virtual reality need to learn from past tech shifts whilst recognizing that drawing parallels with the past can only get us so far.
Ceci Mourkogiannis, Co-Founder, Metta
Chris Milk is VR’s first auteur. His VR film Evolution of Verse features a CGI train that rushes headlong towards the viewer in a way that makes first-time VR viewers avert their gaze and squeal with fear. Milk’s train is an unabashed callback to one of the most repeated founding myths of the history of cinema: the moment when Parisian cinemagoers were allegedly so terrified by the Lumière brothers’ 1895 short-film of a train that they screamed and ran to the back of the movie theatre to avoid being struck down.
Milk’s point is clear: the immersion made possible by VR represents a shift similar to that experienced by the first generation of cinemagoers who tried to dodge the Lumière brothers’ train.
Milk is not alone in being fascinated by the parallels between VR and those that accompanied previous gigantic shifts in the way we consume media — from film, to color TV, and mobile.
Having studied history at university, I’m the first to admit that I approach technology trends with a historical eye. My first response to the ‘new’ is to look to the past in order to draw parallels with what has happened before. I’m always looking for analogies and parallels that enable me to make sense of technological change in the present.
At Metta, the virtual reality video platform I co-founded together with the wonderful Jacob Trefethen and super-talented Guillaume Sabran, we’ve meticulously studied other massive shifts in the way we consume media as a way of shedding light on what the future of VR will look like.
When we started out a few months ago, we studied the economics of the early iTunes store and the origins of the app market, the deals between publishers, labels, and studios that made platforms like Spotify and Netflix a success, and we tried to understand how and why the iPhone’s UX design has stuck around so long. We even read books on the early Hollywood Studio System in order to learn more about how new technologies, creativity, and business models came together in a way that has shaped the cultural universes of billions of cinemagoers around the world.
Analogies and historical reasoning are powerful tools for analysis. But it can also be a way of avoiding the challenge of thinking through major shifts on their own terms. It’s a far lighter cognitive load to draw conclusions via analogy, than to begin from first principles and attempt to understand what VR means divorced of its context.
All this is to say that what worked for YouTube, or Instagram, or Vine, won’t necessarily work for VR. At Metta we try to learn lessons from what has gone before, but we’re also intent on focusing on what is unique about VR — as a medium and as an ecosystem — in order to develop our product and our rollout strategy.
Internally, our team tries hard to maintain a distinction between the lessons we learn from the past, and those insights we gain through our own experiences: those lightbulb moments that come after spending 2 hours in VR or speaking to a VR creator on a dodgy Skype connection about what it means to compose a shot in 360 degrees.
Analogy & design
There’s another reason why it’s important to recognize the limits of analogy: it can restrict creativity and innovation when it comes to design. When you’re designing the interface for a new medium, as we’ve been doing on Metta for the past few months, it’s very tempting to try to ‘translate’ what we do on one medium into something for another platform.
For UX designers, VR is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to redesign human/computer interactions from the ground up — without importing too much baggage from the past. And yet, too many of the first apps built for VR seem to be porting design decisions built for mobile straight into the VR interface. It’s the same kind of thinking that led Blackberry to build a rollerball tracker lifted straight from business laptops for its first smartphones. Getting stuck in a “what worked for X will work for Y” mindset is what leads to design choices that don’t take advantage of what a radical new interface like VR can do.
A balancing act
There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes down to finding a balance between the things we learn via history and those we learn through first-hand experience. When it comes to VR, the products and teams who will triumph will be those who manage to learn from their predecessors who successfully launched products on new platforms whilst simultaneously honing an ability to think outside the box and approach the new medium on its own terms.
