Coffee with… Henry Stuart
The boss of Visualise on how VR will impact the entertainment industry and our social lives in the near future
At Second Home Spitalifields, we have one of the best restaurants in London based at the front of our building: Jago. Each month we invite one of our members to chat over a coffee (or a hot cuppa) about exciting new developments in their industry.
With the cost of VR kits tumbling and over 52 million virtual reality headsets predicted to be sold in America over the next year, by the time 2020 rolls around most people will have access to an affordable virtual world. But what how will it impact out social lives? And what does this mean for artists, filmmakers and musicians?
Who better to answer these pressing questions over a casual coffee than Henry Stuart, the CEO of Visualise, a company that specialises in telling stories through the medium of VR.
Work + Life: Good morning, Henry. I’m on the green tea today.
Henry Stuart: Healthy choice.
Work + Life: Thanks – let’s talk VR. What are you setting out to achieve in virtual reality?
Henry Stuart: The direction we’re approaching this industry from is primarily telling stories through virtual reality. Immersing people in other places — whether it’s a real place that we’ve captured or an entirely imagined, virtual world. What we want to do is take people through that experience in a way that tells a narrative so it’s not just a sort of disjointed tech demo. It has to be deeper and more meaningful.
Work + Life: Yes, it had reputation for being a bit gimmicky.
Henry Stuart: What happened was, VR kicked off and the first thing that came out was rollercoaster demos. They just wanted everyone to scream and fall on the floor and that was the best thing possible. Fly over cities, go on a Formula One car, all those things. And there is value in that – maybe it could lead to VR theme parks, but that’s not what we’re in it for. We are storytellers primarily. Our head of VR, Will, he’s a Cannes award winning documentary filmmaker. The majority of the team here is production are focused in telling stories and come from a film background, so that’s really where our hearts are at. That’s where we differentiate ourselves. Our mission is crafting meaningful realities.
Work + Life: What have been the big steps in terms of getting you where you need to be in this journey?
Henry Stuart: Funnily enough it started in 2006 for me. I started a company to produce panoramic photos for virtual tours, as they were called back then. I was doing virtual tours of schools, hotels, all that kind of stuff. I grew that and started experimenting in more advanced forms of tech. One of them was called Gigapixel, these massive panoramas you could zoom into and find tiny details in a huge crowd, which I did for the Royal Wedding. Then I got picked up by Getty to shoot the Olympics, as the world’s first immersive content producer at the Olympics in 2012. So I shot 360 footage there and that’s how I got into 360 degree video, by playing around with that. Which is an amazing thing, but it was still stuck on desktops or mobile, it wasn’t really moved around, so it was limited. In 2012, this Kickstarter was started for the Oculus Rift, by this guy Palmer Luckey (below). He had produced this VR headset in his mum’s garage .
“Oculus Rift completely turned my world upside down. I realised this was a whole new medium. A new medium hasn’t come around for generations. It’s a completely new way of experiencing media.”
So we put 360 video on one of those headsets and it completely turned my world upside down. I realised this was a whole new medium. A new medium hasn’t come around for generations. It’s a completely new way of experiencing media. To be inside a film or to be inside a new virtual world is something completely amazing. So that’s when Visualise was founded — 2013. We’ve tried to gather some of the world’s best producers of VR from literally all around the globe. People moved over here to work with us.
Work + Life: How has the business changed since then?
Henry Stuart: Since 2013 we’ve produced over 100 different experiences in VR. The majority are 360 degree based, but we’re starting to do more and more of what’s called CGVR, which is Computer Generated VR, which are more interactive experiences. It’s more abstract than augmenting reality with those ones. Right now we’re working on a project for Christmas where you put a headset on and you’re in a hot air balloon floating over this American style mid century snowy village. In the hot air balloon you’ve got this present-o-matic machine where you have to pull a lever and throw presents out down the chimney to deliver for Santa, who’s ill. It’s just a kind of fun game we’re making, but it’s that kind of thing. It’s using a device called the HTC Vive, which allows you to walk around so you can walk over to the edge of the basket and look over down at the village. You can adjust your height by pulling on different strings to let air out of the balloon or let more flames in. This is all virtual.
Work + Life: So do you have to wear gloves or use VR wands?
Henry Stuart: It’s got these kind of wands. What you do is you set your boundaries in a real room and then when you put these different peripherals on you can walk around. Then as you get to the edge of the real room, get to a window or a real wall, a grid comes up so you know you’re about to hit something. There’s one company that built a ‘walk the plank’ experience. And someone who tried it on wanted to prove they were really brave and could do it without teetering along so ran across the plank, but of course there was a wall at the other end, and he broke his nose apparently.
“One company built a ‘walk the plank’ experience. Someone wanted to prove they were really brave and ran across the plank, but of course there was a wall at the other end, and he broke his nose, apparently.”
Work + Life: So fabricating virtual worlds is where it’s all going?
Henry Stuart: There’s this whole other world of virtual reality which is interactive. In virtual reality there’s a term that people use called ‘presence,’ which is the experience you’re getting is so good and so real that you feel transported. There’s only so far you can go down that road at the moment in 360 video. When you get into interactive VR, even if it’s a cartoon, the idea that you can see your hands in there, even if they’re controllers, and you can pull things and interact with them it makes sense to you and it’s as you would expect it to happen in the real world, and the fact that you can move around the place, stand up physically, that’s when you get true presence. That’s where your mind starts to get tricked and you suddenly lose yourself, you’re playing in this virtual world as naturally as you would in the real world. That’s an image we’re really excited about.
“Your mind starts to get tricked and you suddenly lose yourself, you’re playing in this virtual world as naturally as you would in the real world.”
Work + Life: What associated tech are you excited by?
Henry Stuart: For us, when we expand our abilities in CGVR, the real excitement is the crossover between the two. Technologies like room scanning, photogrammatory, where you can get a perfect model of the real world by capturing it with thousands of photos from every different angle and every different object. Or putting laser scanners down and recreating from millions of dots the exact world, and then exploring that with one of these headsets, walking around in this perfectly captured place. So those types of technologies are all stuff that we’re starting to get excited about.
Work + Life: The applications of room scanning must be endless, particuarly from a military point of view
Henry Stuart: Forensics as well. Imagine police investigations where you can capture exactly what the crime scene looked like, before anyone had been inside it. And then you could look at it at a later date. People can reopen files ten years later, put a headset on, look around the scene and discover new things,
Work + Life: What are the pros and cons of being able to immerse yourself in a world that’s not real?
Henry Stuart: First of all, it’s a while off before we can get to that Matrix style thing. For example, to be able to see vision like we do now, you need to have 16k per eye on the VR headset. Right now it’s maybe 2k. The idea of having a 16k TV screen squashed down per eye is going to be in ten years time. So it’s a long way before we have that lucid reality view of looking around. There’s always going to be that knowledge in the back of your head that it’s not quite right, but that’s going to change obviously. I think once we get there I think it’s really exciting.
Work + Life: VR is having a renaissance in pop culture too.
Henry Stuart: There’s huge amount of VR dystopians that are going to come out — Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, is coming out as a Spielberg film next year. But ultimately what they’re doing in that is escaping a broken real world and going into this metaverse where you can be whatever you want, you can fly on a dragon, you can be a wizard, whatever tickles your fancy. The present seduction of virtual reality is that you’ll be able to do incredibly practical things too, like meet people, have experiences that you could never have in real life. But also the practical aspects of running businesses. Imagine a construction project where engineers from all over the world are able to collaborate, draw shapes on the road about where they think cranes are going to be deployed, move times forwards or backwards to see what the construction will look like at a certain point. As a very practical business tool it’s going to be huge. Also medical applications as well, there’s a huge amount of medical applications happening right now and these things are only going to get more and more valid as the stuff gets more and more real.
“The present seduction of virtual reality is that you’ll be able to do incredibly practical things too, like meet people, have experiences that you could never have in real life. But also the practical aspects of running businesses.”
Have you heard about how people are using VR to deal with post traumatic stress? They’re recreating the experiences that cause people to have their trauma and exposing them to it, which seems to me counterintuitive, but apparently not. This is a proven way of people dealing with stress and getting over it. In the past what they’d do is go and visit the location and reenact stuff, which sounds awful right? But they recreate these virtual worlds in VR and put people in them, and the people explain ‘that wasn’t quite right, I think there was someone there, or closer. And then the bomb goes off there…’ or whatever it is. So making those things more real is going to make the medical applications more powerful. You can use VR to help take away pain in patients with burns. They’ve made these ice worlds that they put people in so when they’re having treatment on their burns what they can see is this very fun, cartoony ice world.
“You can use VR to help take away pain in patients with burns. They’ve made these ice worlds that they put people in so when they’re having treatment on their burns what they can see is this very fun, cartoony ice world.”
Work + Life: So you see VR as overwhelming positive?
Henry Stuart: I think there are huge benefits to it, because school kids being able to see nearly extinct animals, tourism that doesn’t endanger the planet, all those things are really valid, really amazing things. There’s a huge amount of positive things from VR. Of course, there are things that people like to get really fixated on really, which are the negative aspects – like teenagers who just wanna spend all their entire lives in this virtual world where they’re basically a super hero.
Work + Life: So reality is always going to be a let down when they take off the headset?
Henry Stuart: Well this is the thing — I think they can live quite happily side by side. I think the idea that you can give your child for Christmas a drive around a race track in a Ferrari rather than a scalextric is really quite fun. That would be really amazing and might make real life things quite boring to a lot of people. But I just think that that’s the way that the world’s gonna move. People are gonna go into VR for these kinds of kicks, doing base jumping or wind suit diving, you can just put a headset on and do it. Sit with friends and be at the court side of Wimbledon and all these incredible things just like you were there. But there will be people who abuse it and who stay in there too long. I think that’s a side effect of any kind of addictive virtual world, like World of Warcraft or whatever it is.
“ People are gonna go into VR for these kinds of kicks, doing base jumping or wind suit diving, you can just put a headset on and do it. But there will be people who abuse it and who stay in there too long. I think that’s a side effect of any kind of addictive virtual world.”
Work + Life: We don’t even know the impact of smartphones on the human condition. We had them less than ten years ago and everyone is addicted to them. We don’t even know what the mental repercussions of that will be yet.
Henry Stuart: And if you think it’s hard now, imagine what it’s going to be like with AR. Whereby it’s always there. It’s going to be nuts, isn’t it?
Work + Life: How do you think AR will actually manifest itself? Through contact lenses?
Henry Stuart: First of all it’ll be through glasses. Ray-Ban and people like that are working with Google at the moment very closely after the failure of Google Glass. It’ll come back. VR is meant to be worth 20 billion by 2020, AR is meant to be 100 or something like that. That’s the industry that’s going to go bananas because it’s got an immediate application for every part of our daily life, as opposed to something you might tap out and into for practical or entertainment reasons — VR takes over the real world. AR is information overlaid, making the real world rich, more informative, more useful and making you more efficient in a lot of ways. It’s got business applications and life applications – it’s basically going to replace the smartphone I think eventually, because you won’t need to reference a tablet or anything to be there. First of all it’ll be a pair of glasses, then it will evolve into the contact lens, whatever it is. I think it will become a lot more invasive and interesting, and I think actually that’s a much more frightening thing.
“First of all AR will be a pair of glasses, then it will evolve into the contact lens. I think it will become a lot more invasive and interesting, and I think actually that’s a much more frightening thing.”
Have you seen Hyperreality, it’s a video about what AR could look like in the future? It’s really frightening. As funny and frightening as that video is, it’s things that happen in that video, like, where they’re standing on the pavement and the light goes red and cars start coming, or you’re walking through the supermarket and there’s a little cartoon banana bouncing around on top of them because they’re on special offer, those kinds of things.
Work + Life: I guess the barrier to both AR and VR is that technology is also hardware – those big headsets. What are the big barriers that you foresee?
Henry Stuart: There are a lot of big barriers. The biggest issue is that it’s seen as being incredibly isolating, quite rightly so. You put a headset on, you can’t see the people you’re with and can’t really in any way interact with the people you’re next to. That’s the single biggest issue, but that’s going to change because in the future it is going to be one of the biggest social enablers. The thing is, we’re going to be interacting with people in a totally different way which is a behavioral change as well. So not only do you have to put on this big headset that blocks out people around you, but then you have these avatars of people that are versions of people in this virtual world. We need to get used to how you interact with people in there.
Work + Life: Boiler Room are starting their own virtual music venue. How do you see virtual reality impacting on the music industry in the next couple of years?
Henry Stuart: Well first of all, I think the music industry is one the industries set to benefit most from VR. For an industry that’s had so much of its revenue decline because of streaming. It means that for a lot of big bands and big labels, they want to do big tours. And you get these huge stadium tours that go and there’s limited size to each of the stadiums, a limited amount of tickets to be sold. But if you can capture an event where you can be onstage with the artist, you can be backstage with them you can be in the best seat in the house, then that’s huge value to people. Whether or not, you’ve been to the real thing, you might prefer to go onstage or backstage. Those are things you’ll never do in the real world. That is something that people will genuinely want to pay for, I think.
Work + Life: Is there a different way we can start using the technology to start benefitting the artist performing beyond different camera angles?
Henry Stuart: You see artists like Björk being really clever, because they’re not just looking at it from a film, 360 based viewpoint, they’re looking at creating immersive experiences that are often interactive and that represent the tracks they are played with. So it’s this abstract experience where you go in and be part of and experience it all around you which is a different vision, a different interpretation of a video.
“Artists like Björk are being really clever, because they’re not just looking at it from a 360 based viewpoint, they’re looking at creating immersive experiences that are often interactive and that represent the tracks they are played with”
Work + Life: Are you saying that there is a possibility of people customising or creating a musical experience?
Henry Stuart: Yeah. The idea of a music visualiser which is interactive, whereby you can have all these different shapes around you, and picking up a shape and combining it with another shape, getting a beat going and then pulling something else out of the environment, and then as you do that pulling it all around you depending on what kind of music you make or pace or tempo or the way you move these shapes around. This world gets created, and its unique every time, you get a different track every time. It’s something we’ve been playing with as an idea, there’s a huge scope for it.
Work + Life: Hollywood must be the ultimate VR entertainment destination in the short term, right?
Henry Stuart: Yes, it’s the same trajectory that films are going to take. We’re finding that people end up feeling dislocated from the experience if they are just watching something around them — and it’s got a name for it, it’s called the Swayze effect, after Patrick Swayze in Ghost. The idea that you’re in the background of the scene, you can see what’s happening but you can’t influence it, and nobody can hear you.
“People can end up feeling dislocated from the experience if they are just watching something around them. It’s called the Swayze effect, after Patrick Swayze in Ghost.”
So what native filmmakers have started doing in VR to avoid the Swayze effect is to break that fourth wall and have one of the actors talk to you at some point, or people acknowledge you or allow you to do something or make a decision in the film. At that point the film stops being a film and it becomes an experience, it becomes something you can do, something you can interact with, or people can talk to you in, which effects the outcome of the final thing. In that same way, if you take that template into music then it’s a really really powerful thing.
Work + Life: When do you think that the price point of actually getting into VR will become atractive for the masses?
Henry Stuart: For mobile devices to reach that Oculus quality, I think it’s going to be 4 or 5 years. I spoke to Google yesterday and they showed me Project Tango, this huge Lenovo phone, an incredibly powerful device, moving everything around you and this virtual world grew out of the floor around you, with deers walking through the Google cafe we were in and stuff like that, it was quite an amazing thing. It won’t be long until this kind of stuff. But in the short term, I think the PlayStation VR headsets are hugely important in terms of driving more consumer adoption, it’s a single peripheral to an existing platform that’s already in millions of people’s houses. So I think that’ll be a great way of turbo charging the VR industry in terms of uptake of consumers. Then, if you have applications like music or film, they’ll slot into that existing platform that ecosystem.
Work + Life: Who do you think will challenge Oculus and Vive’s supremacy?
Henry Stuart: They are going to remain as specialist pieces of equipment — but they’re expensive and they need a PC computer to go with them, which never runs easily. But there’s also premium mobile headsets like the Google Daydream which has just come out and that’s a fantastic piece of kit, it’s like another Samsung Gear VR but it’s got a more open system. There will be any number of phones that will be Daydream ready, so it’s not just for Google Pixel phones, it’s also going to be for the Samsung Ranger phones and other phones from other brands. In that headset they’ve got this really clean interface, really amazing experiences that they’re creating, and that’s cheap as well. I think it’s 90 quid or something. That’s something that a lot of people are going to be getting.
Work + Life: But what good is the hardware if you’ve got nothing good to experience – there needs to be a lot more people like you, right? To create an industry that actually matches the demand of the tech.
Henry Stuart: That’s right. VR needs its killer app. Apparently there’s a twenty year old guy, that’s made this shoot ’em up game in VR which is called Onward. It’s for the Vive. he sells it at 18.99 per unit and he’s sold 20,000 of the game already. I think that’s the highest. He’s a twenty year old kid working by himself, he’s produced this multi-player VR game. So yeah, I could say there should be loads more people like us but equally if kids, well he’s twenty years old and he’s made it by himself, and it’s been AAA makers in terms of sales, then that’s incredible. You just need more people trying.
Work + Life: We need a few more geniuses. My 5-year-old son tried VR at Second Dome’s Kids Day in London Fields and was totally immersed. By the time he’s fifteen, all of this will be normalised.
Henry Stuart: That’s it. We see it as behavioural change, as the behavioural norm. Put a headset on as much as you would sit down to watch TV. I can totally understand why there’s a general fear of people getting too involved in VR. I think it’s one of those disruptive technologies that people just aren’t going to look favourably on in terms of people just staring down this tunnel at a screen. But life’s going to be different. There’s going to be different things we get our kicks out of. There’s going to be experiences in the VR world that are just going to be so much richer than anything we could ever get in the real world. We could be face to face with dinosaurs. Imagine that?
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