What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been — from the time of the talkies to a vision of VR
On this day in 1927, viewers heard a voice speak to them from a screen for the very first time. It was the voice of Al Jolson, in “The Jazz Singer,” a film that has come to be known as the very first “talkie.”
Given where we are today, on the cusp of creative revolutions the likes of which we’ve never yet seen, that film’s memorable line, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” seems all the more prophetic, though its modern counterpart might instead be “You ain’t experienced nothin’ yet!”
Virtual Reality, surely the next great creative revolution on the horizon, seems poised to completely upend our sense of what storytelling really is, and what it can really be.
But as we think back on history, and on all that’s transpired since the debut of “The Jazz Singer,” one can’t help but wonder … will we see true greatness emerging from our modern storytelling tools in the same ways it emerged in eras past?
Will we see new films that rival Casablanca, Bicycle Thieves, La Dolce Vita, The Apu Trilogy, The Seventh Seal, Vertigo, and so many more?
Will we hear music to rival the symphonies of Beethoven, the solos of Charlie Parker, the Morna of Cesária Évora?
Will we discover the new plays of a new Shakespeare? The new novels of a new Toni Morrison? Who is the future’s Han-Shan, poet of the Himalayan caves? Who is the future’s Alice Neel, the future’s Huang Gongwang, the future’s Da Vinci?
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s the true meaning of what Virtual Reality is poised to deliver. An end to these genre-bound questions. When the verb is no longer to listen, watch, or read, but instead to experience, then perhaps the above questions no longer apply.
What will VR ultimately deliver? And will we, at some point years from now, look back and recall the first time we experienced something new, that was as seismically game-changing as was Jolson’s voice in The Jazz Singer?
I don’t know the answers yet to these questions, but I’m willing to bet that when it all happens, alumni from the VR Developer Nanodegree program will have something to do with it! Already thousands of aspiring VR Developers are lining up for enrollment day, drawn by the promise of new tools and technologies, and the dream of turning dreams into experience. They’re coming from all corners of the globe, and from wildly diverse backgrounds. Together, they are the creative revolution. And believe you me, you ain’t experienced nothin’ yet!
If you can just get your mind together, then come on across to me
We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise, from the bottom of the sea
But first, are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have …
— Jimi Hendrix, “Are You Experienced?”
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This post was written by Christopher Watkins, Senior Writer, Udacity
