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PARK CITY, Utah — To read all the hyped-out coverage of virtual reality at Sundance, you’d think we were in the midst of a storytelling Renaissance. Actually strap into some of this stuff and you’ll soon see that it’s still very much the virtual Dark Ages.
Narrative storytelling on VR headsets remains a generally terrible experience in 2016, and the green shoots are barely poking out from the Park City snowpack. Though the Sundance Film Festival has firmly positioned itself as the VR-as-film event of record, it pains me to say that projects worth your brow-sweat are many years away.
The fest’s New Frontier section, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary as Sundance’s avant-garde mashup of art, tech and film, saw its first prototype VR installation in 2012. The next year it grew to a handful. Last year, a dozen.
This year there were so many VR demos — more than 30 in the curated portion alone — that they’ve spilled out of the cramped upstairs space above the Claim Jumper restaurant and into Park City’s private parties and foothill mansions.
The public show of force was impressive, but the showiest VR demos were going down in private.
Penrose Studios was among these virtual outliers, flashing a Pixar-like flair with animated The Rose and I at New Frontier before unveiling Allumetteback at the condo, where the Bay Area upstart showed a brief preview of the animated fantasy about a little girl who wields magical matchsticks in a city among the clouds. When completed to its full 20 minutes, Allumette is believed to be the first VR film of such length.
People across the nascent medium readily acknowledge that the current narrative content is embryonic at best — and are optimistic, of course, about its horizons. Writes Robert Stromberg, director of The Martian VR Experience in a blog post for 21st Century Fox:
This moment feels very much like the beginning of film. In particular, this intensely different way of experiencing content reminds me of the cinematic lore of the “train effect”: In the early days of cinema, a train on the screen approached the audience, and — alarmed by how realistic the imagery appeared — the moviegoers panicked and ran out of the theater. ... Like those nascent days of film, there’s a power to VR that hasn’t truly been contained yet.
But when is some piece of content going to break out that will finally capture mainstream attention on its own merit?
“There are a couple of reasons why it’s going to happen sooner than you think,” VR pioneer and Emblematic Group CEO Nonny de la Pena toldMashable in between demos of Planned Parenthood clinic experienceAcross the Line. “And the Oculus pre-order sales of a million headsets were gone within a day is one indicator. … Everybody said it was going to be hard-core gamers, but there are filmmakers flocking to the medium. In fact you hear more about the filmmakers’ pieces than you are about the gaming pieces.”
That much is true — perhaps none more than The Martian VR Experience, some of the slickest-looking use of the platform to date. But the 20th Century Fox-backed installation is still tethered to an existing property, does little more than re-create a few key scenes from Ridley Scott’s film, and requires a specially equipped motion chair to achieve its full effect.
Some perspective is in order here: The Sundance Film Festival, which started in '78, was 21 years into its existence before the first truly high-profile independent film acquisition, Sex, Lies and Videotape, exchanged hands between producer and distributor in 1989. VR may not need that kind of time to gestate, but five years in, its equivalent groundbreaking deal has yet to emerge.
“We’re waiting for the audience to develop,” New Frontier curator Shari Frilot told Mashable. “In 2016, that wait-list for a million Oculus headsets will start to realize, and we’ll start to be able to answer that question. At Sundance I’m talking to a lot of industry executives — movie execs — that are asking me about what VR experiences are acquirable. That conversation is actually starting to happen.”
VR can be transformative when it works, but those moments are so frustratingly rare and clumsily stitched together
VR can be transformative when it works, but those moments are so frustratingly rare and clumsily stitched together that the hype has outrun reality. And that’s only partly the fault of the creators, who are grappling with a medium as new as the moving image was to the Lumiere Brothers.
They deserve some time to experiment, and judging by the crushing crowds that made seeing most of New Frontier’s VR impossible, they may get it. But VR filmmakers are all hobbled by a cumbersome delivery module — with perceptible sharpness still inferior to even the cheapest TV screens — terrible cross-brand compatibility, across-the-board glitchiness and overall lack of quality in both capture and storytelling techniques.
These hurdles haven’t stopped dozens of startups from giving it a go — some of them promising, others we'll surely never hear from again.
“It’s such a young industry ... we don’t know yet who’s going to be the producers and who’s going to be the distributors," Frilot said. "We’re also going to out of this festival take on media partners, but we don’t know how it’s going to form yet.”
Before it does take any meaningful form, at least as a narrative storytelling platform that consumers will want to pay money for, the platform needs to clear some major barriers — and not just the fact that the content isn't all that great yet.
Ten reasons that virtual reality isn't yet ready for its current close-up:
1. The visual quality is atrocious
See those pixels? You should not see those pixels.
Even the spanking-new consumer generation headsets, with their maxed-out resolution (2160 x 1200 for HTC's Vive and Oculus Rift, 2560 x 1440 for Samsung Gear VR) have noticeable grains in the image, motion remnants and general blurriness everywhere.
Remember sitting up close to your parents' TV to see how the pictures worked up close? It's like that — but virtual!
Maybe 3rd- and 4th-generation headsets can address this with more dense pixellation and higher refresh rates to defeat the motion-ghosting, but that will require an even more intense data delivery, only worsening the problem of ...
2. Those uncuttable cords
Could there anything more cumbersome when fumbling blindly around in a room than a cable attached to your HEAD?
And these are not going away. If you thought wireless VR was just around the corner, just listen to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey:
And even when they do find a way to float that much information through thin air ...
3. Headsets are uncomfortable and dorky
The future is supposed to bring us thinner, lighter goggles and headphones, but to really get a good seal and enough sound and light protection to keep the experience 100% "immersive," you're going to need some heft. Heft means heat, heat means sweat, sweat means GET THIS THING OFF OF ME.
“People say, ‘Well what about the headset? Nobody wants to wear it that long,’" de la Pena says. "Then people try the Tilt Brush in Vive, the painting program. And you can’t get them out of the goggles! … So how then do we translate that engagement of tote brush with the narrative? And once you get that marriage, I think we’re getting into really interesting territory.”
But Tilt Brush is a creative tool, not an entertainment. And there's only one thing universally appealing enough to compel someone to quietly wear one of these contraptions for more than a few minutes at a time.
And even then ...
4. It takes a village
Here's how every single VR experience goes:
One guy explains what you're going to do. Another puts the headphones on you and keeps the HDMI cord from tangling up your feet as you bumble around. A young woman runs the desktop or console, starting the experience and stopping it. A fourth guy is in your headphones, saying things like "Maybe you should turn around and see where that noise is coming from" and "Now grab the balloon! No, the balloon. The other balloon. The one on your left. No, look up. UP," etc.
Folks, there are nuclear submarines that require less manpower to operate than this circus. So does the Oculus Rift come with a staff of twentysomethings in goatees and chunky glasses? Or do you hire your own?
And how to be sure they know how to use the ...
5. Positioning towers and other clunky gear
In one corner, a desktop PC or gaming console, size and weight circa 1999. In two others, "positioning towers" tripod-mounted boxes straight from a movie set.
Bulky hand controllers. Cables and doo-dads strewn about the floor to make it all play nice.
Does this sound like the makings of a relaxing night of home entertainment? If you said "No, it sounds like the makings of dad's next heart attack," you have answered correctly.
6. You’re kinda glitchy, dawg
Once you're all strapped in, there is about a 90% chance that something will go haywire.
I did more than 10 of these at Sundance, and just about every one was at some point worse for the 'ware.
On The Martian VR Experience, I intentionally crashed the rover into a giant rock, which somehow made astronaut Mark Watney's hand dangle as if it had been broken clean at the wrist (this was not part of the game, just a controller issue).
Across installations, there are hinky title screens and interstitials and moments of blackness that jerk you in and out of the experience.
Smooth.
7. It's a head-turner, and that's not a good thing
If craning your neck in all directions was in any way pleasant, 360-degree movie theaters would be a thing by now. They are not, because when you're being entertained, you want to move as little as possible.
The whole point of entertainment can be defined as a means by which to sit still, and 2D screens are quite good at accomplishing this. As long as the most interesting virtual reality requires us to stand, twist, stoop, twirl and turn, it's doomed to stay on the fringe of favorite pastimes.
8. It’s hard to cross content over platforms
What's made for Oculus Rift, stays on Oculus Rift — for the most part.
At present moment, there's no easy way to port content created on one brand of headset over to another; creators have to make multiple versions with different protocols in order to do that. And some do.
But until this arms-race of companies agrees on some degree of universality, the marketplace of content will be terribly fragmented.
Imagine if your TV could get Hulu, but not Netfilx; or cable, but not broadcast TV. Maddening, right?
9. Barriers to entry vs. traditional filmmaking
We've all heard by now how 2015 Sundance breakout Tangerine was shot on an iPhone (if you see it, it's almost not to be believed how good it looks). Now imagine trying to work with one of these:
From a tech standpoint, making a movie has never been easier.
Making VR, not so easy. Not only do you need tens of thousands of dollars in VR cameras, "stitching" software and processing power, you'll need lots of time to experiment, because ...
10. The storytelling language hasn't been cracked yet
Should the camera move? Should the action be seen from the viewer's first-person perspective, or some fixed point? Both? How fast can you fly around without getting sick? How close can you get to an object?
These and hundreds of other questions are being worked out at Hollywood studios, startups, brand labs and all manner of VR dabblers around the world, and for all their efforts, no one has any answers yet.
There's good reason to believe there will come a day when someone will solve these puzzles and put VR on the map with that one iconic project that truly transports us to another world the way that James Cameron elevated 3D with Avatar.
Until then, VR will remain a novelty act — no matter how many installations they bring to Park City.
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