I started this journey when I read Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality in the early 90’s and was hooked. I bought a massive PC and installed World Building Tool kit and 3D Studio and started building my virtual reality.
It’s 1995 and I am strolling through MecklerMedia’s VR World. I put on a head set and a set of gloves that is heavy and wired to the hilt. I reach out to a bible on the pulpit of a church and reach down and turn the pages. I am floored. I move into an interactive video game where I am in a gyro-sphere straight out of Lawnmower Man.
I am strapped in and spinning I see 3D images of spider like aliens and then I realize my body is the the control. I have a joystick to fire and move left and right but spinning in the gyro moves my ships orientation. Amazing I am so blown away! I know I am seeing the future and want it to be now. Well as we all know VR was not ready for prime time in the 90’s. The cost, size and computing power was all out of whack and this technology tease was just that. We had a lot of hurdles to overcome and as much as I wanted it to be, the time just was not right.
I followed my other passion digital, focusing on media and content creation. I have dipped my toe a number of times in the last ten years but still saw the limitations. I shot the machinima of Drew Carey interviewing Howard Rheingoldin Second Life in the mid 2000’s for a TV show.
It one of those moments where the past meets the future and the vision of VR was still just out of reach. It was frustrating but inspiring.
FFW to 2016 and now we sit poised to realize the dream of the 90’s. No it’s not a Portlandia episode but the culmination of R&D and teams of people inspired by Gibson and Stephenson to realize our virtual dreams. With HTC Vive, Oculus, Sony, Magic Leap, Google Cardboard, and a number of other headsets hitting the market in the year we are about to have our Pong moment with VR. Still primitive but mass market.
For both VR & AR we have a large set of tools to develop content as well. Unity,Unreal, The Foundry and tons of others are building the tools for creation and management of the 360 environments and stories.
The issue that I see in VR is the forced construct in storytelling. The limited choice in a story in VR choose red or blue, go left or right. How do we as creators enrich the story pathways to extend and take advantage of this technology to move beyond a “forced” choice and create the magical moments that would come if another methodology were used.
I am currently working on a story bible structure that integrates a construct for story pathways that use a mechanism, that I think will allow for these magical moments. I will expound upon these ideas in the coming months to get feedback.
A big part of the equation in VR that I am not seeing a lot of conversation about is the visual recognition technologies that are coming integrated into the VR and story telling conversation. If the interface can “see” your interest or intent, then this allows for some very interesting story telling mechanics that we as creators will be able to use. Audience measurement takes on a whole new meaning at this juncture.