It never rains but it pours in the world of virtual reality (VR). There can be times when the news seems a little barren and at other points there’s so much going on it can be hard to keep up. As VRFocus’ Nina does every Thursday, she’s rounds-up some of the biggest and best stories, with a few quirky ones for your viewing pleasure.
This week’s VRTV features Nvidia and how the company is working towards reducing VR latency, Facebook and its plans for shows that include VR dating, Oculus and its VR for Good Creators Lab, Marvel examining the prospect of VR, and Paw Print Games’ videogame Bloody Zombies.
This week’s stories, click here for more information on each:
In May 2016, Oculus unveiled the VR for Good initiative alongside its Creators Lab as a way of nurturing immersive content creation. Today the company has announced the of the 2017 Creators Lab, pairing up new filmmakers with causes around the world to create virtual reality (VR) content that highlights social change and the need for it.
Starting today until 15th May 2017, filmmakers and non-profit organisations can apply to take part in this collaborative opportunity, with those chosen heading to Los Angeles for a two-day summit featuring workshops, brainstorming, mentoring, and community building from 15th – 16 June 2017.
VR has been used by organisations around the world to highlight the plight of others, such as the UN and Within on My Mother’sWing, or 360-degree experience Growing a World Wonder. Most recently showcased the ninth film from last years initiative Step to the Line. This video – available for Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear Gear VR, and as a Facebook 360 video – put viewers inside the shoes of an inmate, from the claustrophobia of a confined cell to dealing with everyday life behind bars.
VR for Good and the Creators Lab programme will two of the initiatives making use of the $50 million USD Oculus has put to one side to fund the development of non-gaming, experimental VR content, from a $250 million fund for VR developers. This was announced last week when Jason Rubin, VP of Content, confirmed the closure of Oculus Story Studio, the in-house developer of Lost, Henry and Dear Angelica.
If you want to create this kind of content, either to help spread awareness of the need for social change or just simply aiding a non-profit cause, then head to the Creators Labs sign-up page for more info.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Creators Lab and VR for Change, reporting back with the latest updates.
June is a busy time in the VR industry, largely thanks to the behemoth that is E3. But while gamer’s eyes are on Los Angeles, a group of filmmakers and enthusiasts gather in the UK city of Sheffield to celebrate a very different medium, the documentary, and VR is becoming an increasingly vital part of that.
Sheffield Doc/Fest returns from 9th – 14th June 2017 and, along with a series of worldwide premieres and special screenings, the Alternate Realities installation is back too. This unique exhibit showcases how people are getting to grips with making VR content that audiences can relate to like never before, last year hosting incredible experiences like Easter Rising: The Voice of a Rebel, and a range of pieces that tackled the immigrant crisis.
Since last year Doc/Fest has appointed Dan Tucker to Curate the 2017 Alternate Realities line-up. Tucker himself was at the show last year, having worked on Easter Rising with the BBC, but he’s thrilled to be bringing other people’s work into the spotlight this year. He tells me this year’s installation will be bigger than ever, with 17 VR projects, more venues showing VR, and some big new experiences being revealed.
The theme of this year’s show, Tucker tells me, is “human identity and human connection.”
“In a world that seems to be increasingly defined by division this showcase and the summit focus on what makes us human and what connects us to each other,” he says. “To this end we have experiences that push empathy, intimacy, bonds of family and the value of community.”
To that end, Tucker has some choice selections from this year’s showcase. He describes Blindfold from iNK Studios as “very moving and uses simple nodding and shaking of the head to shape the story.” The piece focuses on human rights issues against journalists and shows a distressing interrogation.
In My Shoes: Intimacy, meanwhile, is a piece from artist Jane Gauntlett that “takes two people through increasing situations of intimacy and touch” as you’re guided by strangers.
Doc/Fest itself has also commissioned its own piece, Future Aleppo, which uses a paper model of the Syrian city of Aleppo “not only as an installation alongside the VR experience but also as companion device that you can interact with by touching buildings covered in conductive paint to trigger audio and visual media.”
Tucker also flags up another hugely interesting experience, DOOM ROOM, which is set to combine interactive theater with VR. He describes it as “psychedelic mediation of life and death” but also adds that it’s “not for the faint hearted.” The trailer above gives you a good explanation as to why that is.
These experiences will mix traditional full VR with 360 video in a way that few other exhibits can do. “I think it is vital to mix both 360 and full VR experiences and I think the lines of division that are drawn between the two are false, unhelpful to audiences and forget the most vital ingredient: story,” Tucker says. “The story is why people put on the headset, not the technology.”
Tucker isn’t a fan of dividing these two types of experiences. “So, as these two side of the coin evolve and produce inspiring content, please lets stop creating division and start to work together and learn from each other,” he says.
Then there’s the Alternate Realities summit on Sunday June 11th, which will gather many of the creators behind this year’s selection to talk about their projects and the technologies behind them.
Alternate Realities won’t just be about VR this year, though. There are also some augmented reality experiences, like Where The Universe sings, which uses phones and tablets to “bring the paintings of Lawren Harris to life with original archive audio of the painter talking about the works and his life philosophy.” More traditional games and interactive experiences are being brought into the fold too.
All-in-all it’s looking like a packed year for Doc/Fest and Alternate Realities.
Some of us will be lucky enough never to be in or witness a car accident. Personally I haven’t been so lucky; I’ve seen one car totalled right in front of my eyes and a pretty horrific collision with a pedestrian over the past few years. I don’t need to be reminded of the importance of driving responsibly, but many young drivers that are just starting out do. Drive VR is a great way to show them.
This UK-made Google Cardboard app was released earlier this year as part of the Safer Roads initiative. Going beyond a simple collection of 360 degree videos, it allows users to choose between one of two characters, presenting a social media-esque timeline for you to follow. At certain points along the timeline you’ll be asked questions about road safety and, depending on the choice you make, you’ll then watch a video showing the consequences of your actions.
Tom, for example, starts his timeline at the end of school, where he’s partying with friends. After smoking a lot of cannabis, however, he jumps in the car. You’re asked whether it’s safe for him to drive home. Now the answer is obvious, but the app lets you watch the video anyway. Instead of the expected collision, Tom is stopped by the police, spends time in prison, and loses his license for 18 months.
As a result, you start to see Tom’s later timeline shift, sort of like Back to the Future, only in reverse. He ends up missing a few holidays he’d long planned for, and even gets dumped by his girlfriend, marrying someone different later down the line.
If you continue to mess with the timeline, Tom might find himself permanently in prison, or simply missing out on the huge opportunities coming his way later in life. There’s a particularly scary sequence inside an ambulance too, that’s sure to be an eye-opener for many young viewers.
“The unfortunate reality is that young people aged 16-24 continue to be over-represented in collision figures, both locally in Warwickshire and West Mercia, and nationally,” says Safer Roads’ Anna Higgins. “Engaging with this age group is a priority for us and we aim to provide them with simple information which will allow them to make the right choices as drivers, passengers and pedestrians.”
Ultimately this is a poignant piece that proves how VR can be used to let us witness our potential mistakes before we make them.
Back in May 2016, Oculus announced its VR for Good initiative, a six week programme for students. One of the areas covered was 360-degree filmmaking and today Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has released the ninth project to be made, Step to the Line.
As Zuckerberg explains in his posting: “One of the most powerful side effects of VR is empathy — the ability to understand other people better when you feel like you’re actually with them.”
“When I was in Alabama two months ago as part of my “Year of Travel” challenge, one of the most powerful experiences for me was meeting Anthony Ray Hinton, a man who was exonerated and released after 30 years on death row. There’s nothing like meeting someone like Anthony in person, but VR can get you pretty close. It’s a reminder of how much work we have to do to guarantee equal justice for all.”
So the filmmakers decided to create a short documentary about the US prison system and the stories of the inmates. Step to the Line was created by Ricardo Laganaro in collaboration with Defy Ventures with mentors Christie Marchese and Picture Motion.
Viewers will be able to see first-hand the stories of real inmates, learning what’s it’s like to be a part of the modern criminal justice system and how release from incarceration can be just as jarring as the intake.
Step to the Line can be viewed below as a 360-degree video, for a more immersive experience head to Oculus Video on Gear VR.
If you want to see move content like this head to the VR for Good website, which details more of the films from 2016 due to be released and what’s going to ahppen over 2017.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus’ VR for Good, reporting back with the latest announcements.
A few years ago director Michael Rossato-Bennett and Music and Memory’s Dan Cohen started to explore the effects music had on people with Alzheimer’s disease. As documented in 2014’s Alive Inside, they began to see patients become more expressive and joyful through use of this long-established medium.
MyndVR co-founder Chris Brickler was particularly struck by the documentary. “I got to thinking,” he says, “Wow, virtual reality could do that at an order of magnitude.”
Brickler and co-founder Shawn Wiora are now trying to do just that.
Though still in its early stages, MyndVR has big ambitions. Brickler, who has previously worked for Verizon and British Telecomm, sees these beginnings turning into a Netflix-like service of medical grade experiences that will help elderly people with various conditions. Imagine different content that could elicit more emotions, or help calm you in times of need, or even let you see more clearly.
“I think one of the things that was interesting to me about VR was not trying to satisfy the twenty three year old gamer,” Brickler tells me over the phone. “We would actually try to create a healing health care solution with this technology that would actually serve the good of all of humankind.”
But there’s a long way to go before MyndVR gets to that stage, and Brickler is very aware of that. He’s quick to point out that the early experiments the company is undertaking are not in any way medically official, but it’s partnering with other organizations to try and get some tangible results in the near future.
“It’s very difficult to measure that,” he explains. “But we are now you know going into clinical trials that we’re going to measure but the main thing we knew was that this would bring smiles on faces as well.”
On a purely observational level, though, MyndVR seems promising. So far the company has teamed with students at the University of Texas at Dallas campus to create several kinds of experiences. One is a 360-degree video of a Frank Sinatra tribute show. “I brought in 30 actors into this thing and recreated a nighttime environment where these people really are immersed into the idea that you’re sitting on a table and someone’s performing your favorite songs,” Brickler explains.
It’s experiences like that that are pushing Brickler and Wiora to create more and more content. They want a platform where people can choose from a range of different experiences that will genuinely aid their loved ones. They also have some incredibly unique ideas for the future, like virtual home environments where picture frames might showcase past photos, and TV sets will show them videos of loved ones and past memories.
The hope is that these kinds of experiences will enable neuroplasticity. “Neuroplasticity is basically the idea of your brain regenerating past neural pathways that have been dormant and used and exercised.” Brickler explains.
MyndVR is the kind of company we want to hear a lot more from going forward. As the elderly population in the entire world continues to grow, demand for these kind of experiences could grow exponentially.
“You know it’s just a betterment of life,” Brickler says. It’s hard to argue with that.
Gabo Arora founded the United Nations VR, and has directed some of the more well-known VR empathy experiences starting with Clouds Over Sidra in December 2014 in collaboration with Chris Milk’s VR production house Within. Milk first showed Clouds Over Sidra during Sundance 2015, and featured it prominently in his VR as the Ultimate Empathy Machine TED talk in March 2015, which popularized VR’s unique abilities for cultivating empathy.
I had a chance to catch up with Arora at Oculus’ VR for Good premiere party at Sundance where we talked about producing Clouds Over Sidra, his new Lightshed production company, and the importance of storytelling in creating VR empathy experiences.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Arora’s work has been at cross section of storytelling and technology, and diplomacy and humanitarian efforts. He studied film in college, but was unable to launch a successful film career in Hollywood, and instead turned towards humanitarian work with NGOs after 9/11 and eventually with the United Nations in 2009. He used his creative sensibilities to move beyond written text reports, and look to the power of new media to tell humanitarian stories. He had some success with collaborating with social media sensation Humans of New York photographer Brandon Stanton by coordinating a 50-day global trip with in 2014 in order to raise awareness of millennium development goals. He proved the power of using emerging technology to promote humanitarian goals.
After he was introduced to Within’s Chris Milk in 2014, he gathered enough support to create a virtual reality lab at UN staring with creating an experience about the Syrian refugee crisis. Clouds Over Sidra was shot in two days in December 2014 at the Za’atari Refugee Camp, which had over 80,000 Syrian refugees. Arora wanted to focus on a day in the life of a 12-year old refugee, and collaborated with his UN contacts to find the young female protagonist named Sidra. Arora said that a big key to cultivating empathy in virtual reality is to focus on the common ordinary aspects of day-to-day living whether that’s eating a meal or preparing for school. While some of these scenes would seem like non-sequiturs in a 2D film, the sense of presence that’s cultivated in VR gives the feeling of being transported into their world and a feeling of being more connected to the place and story.
Arora acknowledges that merely showing suffering of others can have the opposite effect of cultivating empathy. He cites Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others as a book that helped provide some guidelines for how to represent the pain of others. He’s aware that we can have a lustful relationship towards violence, and that there are risks of normalizing suffering can create an overwhelming sensory overload. He’s addresses some of Paul Bloom’s arguments in Against Empathy in that there’s a bias towards empathizing with people who look or act like you. If there’s too much of a difference, then it can be difficult to connect through on any common ground. This is a big reason why Arora has typically focused on finding ways of representing the moments of common humanity within the larger context of fleeing from war or coping with a spreading disease like Ebola.
Arora was able to show that Clouds Over Sidra was able to help the United Nations beat their projected fundraising goal of $2.3 billion dollars by raising over $3.8 billion, but he’s much more confident in showing the UNICEF’s numbers of being able to double face-to-face donations from 1 in 12 without VR to 1 in 6 with VR with an increase of 10% per donation. With these types of numbers, there’s been a bit of a gold rush for NGOs to start making VR experiences for a wide range of causes, but Arora cautions that not all have been successful because not all of them have had an emphasis on good storytelling or the technical expertise that he’s enjoyed with his collaborations with Within.
Hamlet on the Holodeck author Janet H. Murray recently echoed the importance of good storytelling in VR experiences by saying that “empathy in great literature or journalism comes from well-chosen and highly specific stories, insightful interpretation, and strong compositional skills within a mature medium of communication. A VR headset is not a mature medium — it is only a platform, and an unstable and uncomfortable one at that.” The storytelling conventions of VR are still emerging, and the early VR empathy pieces have been largely relying upon conventions of traditional filmmaking.
Arora admits that there’s a certain formulaic structure that most of these early VR empathy pieces have taken that rely upon voice over narration, but he says that he started to dial back the voice overs in his most recent piece The Ground Beneath Her. He says that his recent collaboration with Milk on the U2 Song for Someone music video showed him that there’s a lot that can be communicated without resorting to voice overs.
Murray argues that “VR is not a film to be watched but a virtual space to be visited and navigated through,” and she actually recommends “no voice-overs, no text overlays, no background music.” I’ve independently come to the same conclusion, and generally agree with this sentiment because most voice over narrations or translations feel scripted and stilted. They are also often recorded within a studio that doesn’t match the direct and reflected sounds of the physical locations that are shown, which creates a fidelity mismatch that can break presence and prevent me from feeling completely immersed within the soundscapes of another place.
I’ve found that the cinéma vérité approach of having authentic dialog spoken directly within a scene works really well, or that it works best if the audio is directing me to pay attention to specific aspects to the physical locations that are being shown. After watching all ten of the Oculus for Good pieces at Sundance, one of the most common things that I saw is not having the physical location match whatever is being talked about. Sometimes they’re interesting locations to look at, but it ends up putting the majority of storytelling responsibility within the audio. If the audio were to be taken away, then the visual storytelling isn’t strong enough to stand on it’s own.
6×9’s Francesca Panetta used audio tour guides as an inspiration for how to use audio in order to cultivate a deeper sense of presence within the physical location being shown. One live-action VR piece that does this really well was a cinéma vérité piece by Condition One called Fierce Compassion, which features an animal rights activist speaking on camera taking you on a guided tour through an open rescue as it’s happening. The live delivery of narration feels much more dynamic when it’s spoken within the moment, and feels much more satisfying than a scripted narration that’s written and recorded after the fact.
A challenging limitation to many NGO empathy pieces is that they often feature non-English speakers who need to be translated later by a translator who doesn’t always match the emotional authenticity and dynamic speaking style of the original speaker. Emotional authenticity and capturing a live performance are some key elements of what I’ve found makes a live-action VR experience so captivating, but it’s been rare to find that in VR productions so far. There are often big constraints of limited time and budgets, which means that most of them end up featuring voice over narratives after the fact since this is the easiest way of telling a more sophisticated story. This formula has proven to be successful for Arora’s empathy pieces so far, but it still feels like a hybrid between traditional filmmaking techniques and what virtual reality experiences will eventually move towards, which I think Murray quite presciently lays out in her piece about emerging immersive storyforms.
Arora’s work with the UN in collaboration with Within has inspired everyone from the New York Times VR to Oculus’s VR for Good program and HTC’s VR for Impact. It also inspired Chris Milk’s TED talk about VR as the “ultimate empathy machine”, which is a meme that has been cited on the Voices of VR podcast dozens of times.
But the film medium is also a powerful empathy machine as Arora cites Moonlight as a particularly powerful empathy piece that was released in 2016. Roger Ebert actually cited movies as the “most powerful empathy machine” during his Walk of Fame speech in 2005. He said:
We are born into a box of space and time. We are who and when and what we are and we’re going to be that person until we die. But if we remain only that person, we will never grow and we will never change and things will never get better.
Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life for a while. I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.
This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I’m not just stuck being myself, day after day.
The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people.
Ebert’s words about film as a powerful empathy machine as just as true today as when he said it in 2005. I do believe that virtual reality has the power to create an even deeper sense of embodied presence that can trigger mirror neurons, and may eventually prove to become the “ultimate empathy machine.” VR may also eventually allow us to virtually walk in someone else’s shoes to the point where our brains may not be able to tell the difference between what’s reality and what’s a simulation. But as Murray warns, “empathy is not something that automatically happens when a user puts on a headset.” It’s something that is accomplished through evolving narrative techniques to take full advantage of the unique affordances of VR, and at the end of the day will come down to good storytelling just like any other medium.
VR has already been used for a lot of positive and inspiring projects, but getting these off of the ground without the help of a major organization or charity can be tough. For those looking to use the technology in this way, a new platform named VR Together might be able to help.
VR Together was announced today with support from Samsung, VR production studios REWIND and m ss ng p eces, and Nonny de la Peña, a journalist that has long been using VR to tell her stories. It’s a platform that will allow developers and creators to pitch projects they need help with, linking them with other companies and individuals to offer their support, skills and ideas. It essentially gives VR companies that are looking to use their talents for good an easy way to do so.
It might be that you only have a few hours a week to devote to helping out, maybe even a month. That’s okay for VR Together; you’ll be able to collaborate with others to make a meaningful impact on their projects. You could offer your equipment to film 360 degree experiences, or help code complex virtual sequences.
Speaking to UploadVR over email, REWIND founder and CEO Solomon Rogers said that VR Together was born “from a desire to do something meaningful beyond pure commercial work and to make a positive impact.” He called the initiative an “opportunity” for members of the VR community to use their skills to help those outside of it.
“VR Together will match people who want to help with those that need it; collectively we can do much more than working alone,” Rogers explained. “At the moment we are asking people to donate their time and ideas, in the future we hope that VR Together could offer financial help as well.”
Currently interested parties can download a VR Together badge that can be placed on websites and email signatures to help show that they are part of the initiative.
Make sure to follow VR Together on Twitter to keep up to date with its work. You can also contact the group directly at info@vrtogether.org.
