Can VR Do The Locomotion?
Madison Wells Media’s Rob Ogden on Hollywood’s bet on VR, entertainment’s new frontier.
Rob Ogden’s interest in virtual reality dates back to his days frequenting the VR arcades that were popular in the 90s. But not until CNN’s 360 video coverage of the devastating earthquake that shook Haiti in 2010 did he truly realize the transformative power of immersive storytelling.
“It was immediately apparent,” he said out of his Los Angeles-based office. “The was something telling about being transported and offering an experience different from traditional video or filmmaking.”
These days, Ogden is Executive Vice President of Strategic Planning and Corporate Development at Madison Wells Media, the “diversified premium content company” that produces for film, television, VR and AR, live events and digital video. Madison Wells is the corporate parent of OddLot Entertainment, Reality One, and Relevant Theatricals, and holds stakes in STX, Wevr, Fandor, Atom Tickets, and The Void.
We caught up with Ogden to discuss recent developments at Madison Wells (including the release of the highly anticipated Gnomes & Goblins preview), the enormous role artificial intelligence is going to play in interactive VR, and how developer-friendly ecosystems like Steam are key to solving challenges like locomotion.
There is Only R: When did Madison Wells first seriously consider VR as a space to invest in? And what made it such an attractive space?
Rob Ogden: Unpacking that is interesting. There’s kind of two ways to look at it: one is Madison Wells the company; and then each of the individuals pursuing it.
There was recently a Fast Company article about Madison Wells. It talks about [Co-Founder] Gigi [Pritzker] and where she discovered VR—which was at the New Frontier at Sundance. (New Frontier started focusing on VR a few years ago.) [Co-Founder and President] Clint [Kisker] got involved with in-house VR efforts at Legendary, as well as a lot of their digital investments.
For me it was CNN’s coverage of the earthquake in Haiti. They used a device called the YellowBird camera. It was basically a 360 camera rig, and while there weren’t any widely available HMDs at the time, it had a video you could watch on the Internet that was essentially a 360 video that you were able to explore with your mouse. They set up a YellowBird on the back of pickup, driving through the wreckage of the city of Haiti, and it was very immersive. I was interested in that immediately — what the implications were for cinema. Then Oculus came along with the Kickstarter campaign. Basically from that moment on I’ve been following it very closely, and things in the last 18 to 24 months really started picking up with venture investment into the space as hardware platforms are coming to market.
All those things—Clint coming out of Legendary with his VR steam behind him, Gigi having been involved in it through Sundance—came together to allow for Madison Wells and Reality One.
What we’re trying to do here is to be at leading edge of content creation. There have been a lot of investment into platforms, but it’s lagging on the content side. People are being cautious about it and it’s sort of smaller; for a time it was a lot of marketing-related expenditure, promotional work.
But we think there’s definitely a market for more premium content. Being ahead of the market a bit, in terms of developing that and evolving what that really means for the medium is a good thing, and will position us well as the platform gets a high level of adoption amongst consumers. And frankly, you need good content to drive adoption as well, so those things go hand in hand.
Absolutely. Was there a turning point, a development that lead you to double down and really focus on VR?
I want to be clear that Clint and Gigi are the cofounders—I’ve been involved at least conversationally since Clint rolled out of Legendary and had the idea to create a sort of VR studio, but I can’t really speak for Madison Wells because I didn’t found the company, and I wouldn’t want to put words in their mouths.
But I think over the past couple of years there’s been an evolution of the content that you see. A lot of people point to certain experiences that opened their eyes and knocked their socks off, and that’s maybe different for everyone. Once someone has gotten that initial experience that’s of a certain quality level, it’s pretty clear there’s something compelling there. For Gigi that was New Frontier and for Clint that was at Legendary.
What makes a practical investment for you all? What do you look for when identifying brands you want to partner with, collaborate with, or are purely intrigued by on a business level?
We look primarily to intellectual property and known creators. For example, the Sony deal, which we announced last week, is premised on the idea that known IP minimally reduces your downside risk, but also helps you stand out at the marketplace. It doesn’t mean you are free from execution risk. You still need to make a good piece of content around that IP, but it helps you start with a base of awareness. So with Sony, we are partnered on releasing VR experiences that are timed with the theatrical release of motion pictures. It’s not limited to that strategy, but that’s the primary strategy of that partnership.
What that does is allow us to leverage or draft off the awareness generated by the major global marketing campaigns around movies, and it adds a harmonious effect that a well-executed VR experienced can also help drive interest in the movie.
What we’re not doing is promotional pieces. We’re making commercially exploitable and monetizable experiences, so it’s not too unlike game/movie releases of the past. But we’re really focused on creating great VR experiences. It’s not secondary, in the way that many movie-based games have historically been.
We’re trying something that’s really high level and will stand alone.
Right. How do Reality One and Wevr represent that thinking to you guys?
Reality One is our company, so Madison Wells is the parent and you can really think about it as our interactive arm, focused on VR and AR. So I’d say that just represents us as an operating company operating.
Wevr is a strategic investment and partnership. That was one of the first things we did as a company. Wevr has been around for a number of years; we think they are top level content creators and have already proven that out—we are partnered with them to co-produce and co-finance projects. They can be projects that they source or that we bring to them. Additionally, we have commercial terms to our partnership, so we are invested and believe in them from that perspective as well.
Do you think that’s important in these early stages of VR—when it’s such a new frontier with people still exploring the space — to have these separate companies that work well together?
I think there’s definitely benefit to shared knowledge in a medium that’s evolving so rapidly, and you want to partner with people on the cutting edge and driving that forward—Wevr definitely represent that for us.
Wevr is both a studio and a publisher, so that means they staff artists, engineers, etc. We are building Reality One principally as a publisher, so at least initially we’re not staffing artists, animators, engineers, etc. Instead, we’re pairing IP with the appropriate developer for the experience. That gives the freedom to do whatever makes the most sense for a given project.
For example, Wevr is proving to be exceptionally good at in-depth, immersive, story-based content. But maybe there’s another vendor which is great at spaceship mechanics or something and we want something that evolves flying spaceships. So it’s good to have that flexibility to go out to different teams that are best suited for a project.
Wevr is also able to do that, to come on in a vendor capacity. They’re one of the companies right now which are sort of straddling the line between a service provider and the internal content creator, and we were helping them execute on the internal content.
You mentioned known creators earlier with IP. What do you look for in known creators?
The known creator aspect of that really comes to play with a Jon Favreau [who produced Gnomes & Goblins]. He very well fits the definition of a known creator. Then with IP, as I mentioned, you have built-in downside protection and awareness. So you want to have at least one of the two, but you don’t need both in the same project.
If you have a great piece of IP and there’s an unknown, “emerging” talent, you can pair them, because you believe that talent has in some form or fashion proved to you that they have a good vision for what that piece of IP could be in this medium.
Makes sense. How are companies differentiating themselves at this stage?
Right now we’re in an interesting place where many of the companies are evolved as content creation companies and are maybe making tools, or straddle the line between engineering and content creation. We’re primarily interested in the content creation piece of it, that they’re able to execute on that aspect of their business.
The reason being that technology is changing pretty rapidly. Everyone wants to build the platform or the thing that will monopolize a certain aspect of the business—there’s a very sort of tech perspective, especially with the venture capital pouring into it. All these things are kind of driving that.
Venture capitalists want 10X, they want market dominance; those are the things they’re playing for. We’re in the content business, so we’re used to operating in environments with competition. You cannot really dominate the creation of content because there’s no way to protect it. Something that’s good, someone else can sort of mimic or evolve it. Then it’s a constant battle to do that. Then really the only thing you can do when you’re a content creation company is to establish some consistency to essentially have franchises, to have known IP with a built-in fan base.
There are so many parties involved, and the research is coming from all over. So if you really think about what VR is, it’s the sort of amalgamation of lots of technological advances, but there’s no one thing that is like a 10X breakthrough for VR specifically, if that makes sense. Even HMDs themselves are a thoughtful combinations of these evolutions.
Then you get into what are the gameplay mechanics—I call them gameplay mechanics, but think about them as modes of interactivity. One of the big challenges right now is locomotion.
What’s really interesting about the way the market is right now and is helping drive innovation and evolution of the medium is—and this probably couldn’t have happened even 10 years ago—the ecosystem in Steam. Steam is very key for this market —you’ve got all these releases of tech demos and early access previews, and there are people that pick them up, try them, and give feedback.
There are very low, almost no barriers to entry. So you’ve got things like locomotion being a big issue, and you’ve got big development studios and publishers that are trying to solve it for the experiences that they’re releasing—they have their internal team working on it. But then you’ve got this public-facing environment of the community that’s putting out stuff that might be coming up with new mechanics or new things that aren’t happening in the studios. That’s actually enabling the evolution of this medium at a very rapid pace in a very organic way. Steam allows for a lot more transparency and communication.
Back to locomotion—there is this game on Steam right now called Onward. It’s basically a Counterstrike-style shooter.
Right now, most experiences are room-scale experiences, so the fact that locomotion is still an issue becomes very clear. One solution is to have a seated experience, like a cockpit; another is that you don’t move what the room is, so you confine someone to that space and maybe have a very gentle transition to another space. Another mechanic that has been evolved is teleportation, where you point and you can see where you’re going, which helps your brain orient to being in that space. It’s less jarring.
The thing is, in a wave shooter, for example, you might have robots coming at you, but if you have the power of teleportation, that’s a pretty big power, as you can teleport behind them. And it doesn’t always work—in order for it to work, it needs to be a conceit of the experience. If you’re an LAPD detective investigating a crime scene, but you teleport places, what do the characters in that experience think of you when you’re teleporting every place? How do you reconcile that?
So we want to be able to walk around. Onward is the first example where I’ve seen locomotion working in a clean way that isn’t unsettling. You use the D-pad and you basically can walk your whole space, your whole room.
You’d think that would cause motion sickness, but as long as you don’t move your feet at all, it doesn’t. So it’s basically a front-back and left-right movement in your environment. But as soon as you move your foot at all while your moving, it’s like someone knocked you in the head. But if you let go of the D-pad, you can walk around freely.
Anyway, developers will see this and start tinkering this into their own products. You can’t really hold secrets, even at the hardware level, which is typically much more guarded. But at the software level and content creation level, these things are immediately picked up, remixed and recycled, and implemented in different forms, so it’s really about whether or not you are able to create something that is compelling — and if you’re able to be responsive and adaptive to what is happening in the market.
That makes it very difficult if you have a long trajectory. If you were set on creating something that takes three years to develop right now, you might be walking down a path that’s completely wrong. You may have to change so much in that period. Being nimble, having the ability to be responsive and adaptive and turn things out quickly, is huge.
Speaking to those rapidly changing technologies, what major developments do you see happening in the near future, and where are the biggest shortcomings or needs?
I think that it’ll be very interesting to see Magic Leap in AR. There’s a lot of potential there and they’re highly secretive, so I’m curious to see what they’re able to do. If you put together the pieces of what Google is doing — and they aren’t public about this — but if you put together the pieces of what Daydream is and Tango is, and their investment in Magic Leap, we start to see what they saw in Google Glass. I think we are getting closer and closer to a very interesting AI-integrated world of augmented reality. So all the investment is going into AI simultaneously—image recognition being one of the key things that AI can do, along with depth-mapping real space.
Augmented reality has a real interesting future and I don’t know what specific unveils there will be, but I think there’ll be some very compelling ones in the next couple of years.
As for the biggest shortcomings and needs, the two at the top of my list are in 360 video streaming and CGVR.
For 360 video streaming, people are used to streaming content on YouTube. So they don’t want to necessarily download a high file size to experience video. But that’s a problem for 360 video — video itself isn’t designed for 360, and we’ve sort of shoehorned in. It’s a hacky way to make 360 work for a traditional video container. The video containers are designed for a rectangular format and a 360 video is a bunch of video stitched together, warped into this rectangular format then re-warped into a sphere. All that is to say there are not many users capable of streaming these videos the way they should be streamed.
Even when you put on a high quality HMD like a Vive or an Oculus, and you watch a YouTube 360 video — even ones that are captured from high quality capture devices — they don’t look very good because of streaming limitations.
If you don’t have streaming limitations and you download a file, you can get a much higher resolution—but we’re talking about a lot of data. All that said, there are definitely applications for 360 video streaming, mainly live events and putting someone in a space somewhere that they’re okay with being right there and just observing, like on the back of a truck in Haiti. That’s a compelling thing, there’s definitely utility in doing that.
There are highly invested companies like Google and Facebook with huge engineering resources that are pursuing solutions for this, but basically how to stream 360 video at high resolution using our current broadband infrastructure — that’s a big challenge.
Another one is on the CG side, which is more specific to interactive VR (as opposed to 360 video). The biggest challenge there is evolving AI to work for this medium. Game AI is still pretty rudimentary because it doesn’t really need to be that complicated to work for console and PC games. Most game AI is simple—it’s a bad guy and they need to look at you, shoot at you, take cover when you’re shooting them, or throw and intercept the football, whatever it is.
Those things have been developed over many years and sort of reached a plateau, and there haven’t been huge advances in it. But in VR, even with pretty simple stuff — take Gnomes & Goblins for example — the team there had to work a lot on all sorts of things, like eye contact and making a character feel as if it is responding to you, even if it’s not talking. You’re now the physical being, and the subtlety of what you can do and where you want to interact, and making that feel realistic, is important.
And given that many of these experiences are first person, it absolutely needs to be much more responsive and have a lot of different ways it can judge what you’re doing and how to react to that.
If we look how that engagement has evolved, it comes from first person shooters. First person shooters started out relying on cut-scenes to tell story. Then with the introduction of games like Half Life, moved to fully telling story in the first person view. I don’t know if you remember, but in Golden Eye when you had a character that was talking to you, sometimes you just didn’t want to listen to them and would maybe walk away or stand there judo chopping them. The AI wasn’t evolved to react to that; it just kept going.
If you want a real immersive experience for VR, you need the AI to respond to you in a realistic way. What ended up happening was that game developers moved back to cut scenes as a form of storytelling. Now if you look at the big first person shooters like Call of Duty, it’s basically big cinematic cut-scenes, and much more limited storytelling actually in the first person view, because it can be very difficult to make that compelling.
What are your thoughts on projected adoption in the States, including the obstacles and opportunities, and how’s it different from China?
I think it’s difficult to generalize. That’s sort of an issue in VR right now—over-generalization. One over-generalization is bucketing 360 or VR video with interactive VR, and those things are very different. They require very different teams and production times, resources, and they also work differently on different platforms. Anyway, it’s similar when we talk about VR adoption because then you’re potentially bucketing lower level mobile Cardboard experiences with higher level HMDs, which differ greatly in the cost of entry and whatnot.
I don’t want to go on record with my own projection, but I think a lot of the projections out there are that there’ll be strong adoption and the high end HMDs are going to lead with gamers as the early adopters, largely because the cost of entry is quite high.
I think there’ll eventually be some more general purpose users at the high-end, but until the content is really is closer to what you think about when you think about Ready Player One, it’s going to be a lot of gamers.
Then on the mobile side, I think it’s Daydream and things like that. Mobile is an interesting market, because mobile itself is sort of reaching a plateau, and it’s hard to manufacturers to differentiate their devices, so VR capability is a big opportunity.
On the higher end side, I don’t think VR is going to massively reinvent the gaming ecosystem. I don’t think it’s going to double the market size of people that own PlayStations. But I think there will be some people who wouldn’t have otherwise owned the PlayStation or gaming PCs that will invest in those platforms specifically for VR.
China is an interesting market that we are trying to understand better all the time. It moves very quickly. If you look at the way they consume content generally, what makes China interesting is (1) it’s a gigantic market and (2) it’s a market that has a lot of people just entering into sort of the lower level of a middle class, so they have real disposable income for the first time and they’re looking to have new experiences — it’s almost hard to relate to that and imagine what it’s like for them.
That second reason is why blockbuster films and high-budget TV is so compelling and does really well in China — it’s the spectacle. The general Chinese populace is very interested in things that are spectacular, and VR has that effect. But on the flip side of that, one thing that’s really interesting about the market in China and here is that a GeForce 1080 is around $700 here; it’s $700 in China too.
That’s a very different prospect. It’s a huge country but if you think about percentage of population and the average household income level, they’re quite low. People here focus on the how many millionaires are being minted in China, but the average populace are not millionaires. The average cost of a movie ticket is quite low, but it actually makes the VR arcade model to be more compelling there — because it’s the combination of people looking to get out, and go to newly built malls, and experience first-world culture. And this is the first generation that’s really able to embrace that.
So VR arcades are compelling there because many of them are in cities and don’t have a lot of space in their homes. That’s why there are still tons of LAN cafes in China, because there are so many people that still can’t really afford a PC that can run the games that people play in LAN cafes, like World of Warcraft, and those run on computers that are four years old right now. And there’s still enough demand that people go to LAN cafes and do it that way instead of buying a PC and having it at home.
The idea of having a cutting-edge state-of-the-art VR rig which costs $2000 is entirely out of reach for a vast majority of the people out there. So it creates an opportunity for VR that I think is very different than in the US, where really I think the most compelling location-based stuff will be like The Void, stuff that’s significantly differentiated from consumer platforms like Rift, Vive and PSVR.
Last questions: what other companies do you guys look at as doing a good job investing in VR?
There’s a huge vested interest from the big internet software companies, like Google and Facebook. The thing about 360 video is YouTube is already a big business, so for them, going into 360 video is kind of a no-brainer, there’s huge vested interest for Google to make 360 video work.
And they also have such a large reach already that they’re probably going to be in large part the ones that sort of set the tone there. So if you want to make something that’s going to have large reach, you’re going to use YouTube.
But they have a huge vested interest in that, and Facebook as well with their investment in Oculus, so I think the big strategics play a huge part in moving things forward.
There’s been a pretty large influx of venture capital over the past 24 months and there are a number of groups leading the charge there. I don’t want to speak negatively about any strategics that come from our world — which is the content creation world — but I think it is beneficial for a company to be smaller, more nimble, and adaptive in a market that is evolving as rapidly as VR. It’s also very important to not think about this new medium as ancillary, like the home entertainment business is to film.
So I think that we are able to address it in a way that is pretty unique. We’re very bullish on it, so I think that gives us an advantage.
