Hollywood Has No Idea What to Do with VR
Hollywood Has No Idea What to Do with VR
from MIT Technology Review
VR will never be like the movies. Imagine you’re experiencing the 1942 classic, Casablanca, with a digital headset
Warner Brothers did such a brilliant job imagining the world of Casablanca that we’d be content to explore it with a VR headset
VR Citizen Kane might be a survey of the protagonist’s infinite basement. The Godfather VR might allow us to prowl the house of Don Corleone
Will audiences trained in passive linear narrative appreciate it? Will we only recognize it when it has reached a maturity?
Cinema was the art form of C20. Distribution points are multiplying while lengths run from multi-hour TV episodes to 10-second Snapchats
Consumer-ready VR plunge viewers into immersive 3-D environments where they can move within a storyline or game space without feeling sick
Content creators are trying to figure out how it might work. Gaming software represent the most fertile and obvious center of development
Content creators are trying to figure out how it might work. Gaming software represent the most fertile and obvious center of development
You can sense filmmakers taking baby steps toward a new visual and psychological grammar from Dear Angelica developed by Oculus Story Studio
These are evidence of new ways of expressing human experiences, owing little to other media. Yet VR hardware is still very clumsy
The combination of the narrative forward momentum of film and the immersive exploration of VR ends up highlighting the worst of both mediums
The experiences are different on different headsets: Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
In the virtual stores you can find games, apps, social-media platforms, and a lot of VR programming, little of which is terribly interesting
Invisible for Jaunt created by a Hollywood hitmaker is a cheap thriller but has a chase scene visualized in a 360° dramatic landscape
Mr. Robot VR does is wasting the new technology. Jon Favreau’s Gnomes & Goblins is more promising; a preview is available on the Vive
Remembering Pearl Harbor (well done); Paul McCartney’s VR concert documentaries (good); Paul McCartney: Early Days (not so good)
The Rose and I and Allumette (excellent) combine crude stop-motion-style graphics with engaging stories and a genuinely novel vantage point
Many unaffiliated creators in cottage-industry are making 360° films, but only some of them are using 3D, and very little motion tracking
Career Opportunities in Organized Crime bills itself as the first 360° feature-length VR movie but lacks surprise: one appeal of VR drama
1) VR narrative entertainment may live closer to the aesthetics of theater than film; 2) a workable language for VR has yet to be discovered
We’re just at the beginning of VR’s long gestational period and lack words to describe the future because we haven’t invented it yet
