Our project goal was to push the boundaries of VR technology to show what a surf trip feels like from the first-person perspective. I'm excited to share this. It's pretty incredible knowing my mom can now experience riding a 20-foot wave.
I do try to speak of positive things. I still try to, like, present two sides of the story, and I do try to relate to life in a 360 degree and not be one-dimensional. But by all means, manage expectations.
I've never been to a hotel with a rotating restaurant on top, but one time I took my girlfriend to a merry-go-round, and I gave her a burrito.
What's the fundamental problem that VR solves better than anything? To me it's straightforward. It's story. VR tells stories better than any medium.
Virtual reality, to me, seems to have a number of different tiers. Entry-level-tier VR is this experience: on a phone, some simple head-tracking, and some quick and dirty, game-engine-quality stuff.
Look up and down and round about you.!
I'm a huge gamer. I'm very excited, and the idea of the Rift was as a headset that was designed around the specific uses of VR gaming. But I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's outside of it, because I was a VR enthusiast. I want VR to be the thing that we all live in, that we all use for everything, not just games.
When people ask whether virtual reality will be a real thing or just the next 3D, what I always say is, 'Take a headset, walk outside, and the next person you meet, put it on them and see what the reaction is.'
I've always read the papers but didn't feel I knew enough in the past. But doing the research and looking at newspapers and online websites gives you a 360-degree view of the news.
I've tried Oculus Rift; I've played with the Steam VR rig. Both are mind-blowing. In a traditional video game setting, in a first-person shooter, you can see a tower in the distance. You can walk up to that tower and use your controller to look up.
I've been that celebrity on the red carpet, and I appreciate that something hasn't got to just look good from the front, from the back, it's got to look good at all angles.
I absolutely love VR.
I'd really love to work with virtual reality at some point. You could make a killer adventure game with that.
The whole thing with VR is that it doesn't matter, local versus networked gaming. The goal in virtual reality isn't to have people sit in the same room with headsets on.
With VR, you are directing in a 360-degree environment. The biggest challenge is that the viewer can look anywhere. They might look at the the weakest moments, the very things you edit for TV. You don't control where they look.
We have to rethink, how do we get a complete 360-degree understanding of the patient?
There's going to be all different price points, and you get what you pay for. There's certainly low things made of cardboard that you don't put on your head, you just hold up little viewers that give you this glimmer of what VR could be.
Much of the excitement about virtual reality has come from the gaming community.
Oculus really started popularizing a new approach using cellphone screen technology, a wide field of view, and super-low-latency sensor tracking. It's not crappy stuff that doesn't work and makes everybody sick. When you experience Oculus technology, it's like getting religion on contact. People that try it walk out a believer.
We have new tools that can give the audience a sense of not only being there, which is the key element in an IMAX film, but also seeing things in a way that they won't see on television or in feature films.
There are all kinds of things evolving in filmmaking I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. A friend of mine just showed me an immersive 360 movie where you move from environment to environment and can look in any direction you want while you're experiencing it. Which is cool - but it kills directing, as far as I'm concerned.
Virtual reality has an exciting future and oodles of room to grow.
Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it.
