Virtual Reality: It's not just for gamers anymore

The Nokia OZO is a state of the art VR camera.

Virtual reality, or VR, has the potential to redefine the way we interact with images, including still images, movies, and other forms of visual storytelling. It’s already being adopted by major news organizations to take you deeper into stories, Hollywood studios that want to generate more immersive entertainment, and content creators who want to share experiences that don’t work as effectively on a flat screen.

VR is still at a stage where it’s mostly of interest to early adopters, but it’s an exciting time to get involved with this new medium. In particular, it's great time for photographers and filmmakers to start thinking about VR as this technology will likely impact the way we share our work, tell stories, and even remain competitive in business over the next several years.

Timing is everything

My first VR experience came many years ago when a technology incubator next to the molecular biology lab where I worked asked for volunteers to test a new 'human interface technology.' I found myself standing in a room full of computers, wearing a large headset with wires hanging out, and with something that looked like a hockey glove on my hand. A nerdy grad student was on hand to guide me through a virtual world.

The graphics in this world consisted of nothing more than rooms full of poorly shaded spheres, cubes, and cylinders. There was no illusion of reality, but I could navigate through doors and wonder around. I later discovered that the grad student was actually from the psychology department and that I was, for all intents and purposes, a lab rat trying to find my cheese in a virtual maze. The grad student never revealed whether I did a better job of navigating the maze than the real rat, but the VR experience stuck in my mind. My gut told me it had potential.

"I was, for all intents and purposes, a lab rat trying to find my cheese in a virtual maze..."

As Mark Banas’ recent article discusses, and as my own ersatz rat experience confirms, VR has been around for a while and has even enjoyed some success, particularly in the gaming world. However, the technology behind VR may finally be sophisticated enough to give it a fighting chance of being useful to a wider audience, particularly photographers and filmmakers. When I discuss VR in this article I’ll be specifically referring to VR in this context - for photographers, filmmakers, and also visual storytellers.

I’m not a hard core computer gamer or a rabid VR enthusiast; it’s likely that some of you reading this article know a lot more about VR than I do. However, I suspect I’m fairly representative of the typical photographer/filmmaker who’s followed VR from afar with a healthy bit of skepticism, waiting for someone to make a convincing argument that VR is relevant to me.

VR has enjoyed some success in the gaming world, but as a visual storyteller I've been waiting for someone to demonstrate how VR is relevant to me.

That's not to say that I haven’t experimented with VR, it’s just that until recently it never seemed terribly compelling to me as a content creator. Almost every VR experience I tried boiled down the same basic formula:

1. Videographer places a VR camera in an iconic location and captures video from a single spot.
2. Viewer puts on a headset and watches video until he or she gets bored.

At this point it seems like I’ve (virtually) stood around a lot of places: the pyramids of Egypt, next to the Eiffel Tower, Machu Picchu… you get the idea. But the key words are ‘stood around’. The experience can be interesting at first, but after about 30 seconds you’ve spun in a circle, looked up and down, and pretty much seen all there is to see.

But that’s not what you do when you go to one of these places, in real life. You want to explore, to learn something, to understand the story of the people or the place that you're visiting.

Viewing an iconic place, such as Machu Picchu, using VR can be interesting. However, unless you show your audience something unique, help them understand the place, or immerse them in a compelling experience, they will quickly lose interest.

Virtual Experiences

For VR to gain any type of traction it needs to go beyond this ‘stand there and look around’ model - and, fortunately, it has. This was particularly noticeable at the NAB trade show in April where VR technology appeared to be everywhere. There was even a Virtual and Augmented Reality Pavilion that served as a hub for numerous VR companies, including makers of capture devices, display systems, and even content creators.

My personal VR epiphany occurred at a technology showcase run by Kaleidoscope VR, a VR studio. In a roped off area dozens of people sat in chairs spread across the floor, each engrossed in some virtual world. What set the experience apart from most other VR demos I’ve seen was that the focus was on putting viewers into immersive stories andexperiences.

Visitors trying virtual reality at the Kaleidoscope VR showcase.

‘Content is King’ may be one of the most overused phrases in modern media, but it keeps getting recycled because it’s fundamentally true. Lack of good content is why VR always seemed dull or gimmicky to me in the past, but my experience at the VR Showcase proved that with the right content VR can be incredibly compelling.

The first ‘film’ I selected was a VR experience called ‘Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness.’Based on the audio diaries of a man named John Hull, who recorded hours of observations about how he learned to ‘see’ the world through sound after losing his sight in 1983, ‘Notes on Blindness’ isn’t, strictly speaking, an actual film. (It is, after all, an effort to help the viewer understand what it’s like to be blind.) Instead, it uses audio and 3D animations that mimic the real world.