VR is Not a Fad
By: Heston L Abbé
Tags: Virtual Reality, Storytelling, VR, Videogames, Telepresence

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk recently denigrating VR. It seems as though wave of hype has finally crested and the pessimists are having their day.

“It’s just a fad” they say. “Remember 3D TV? Google Glass? VR in the ‘90’s?” “What does VR bring to the table that is truly unique, that we can’t already do in other media formats?” “It’s too complicated and expensive for mass appeal.”

First of all, just because you’ve haven’t yet seen a compelling piece of content that justifies the medium doesn’t mean you never will.

Second, yes the hardware is uncomfortable and expensive; but don’t be ridiculous. Before we know it hardware is going to be cheap, powerful, lightweight, simple and stylish (and the nausea thing will be largely solved with on-board spatial head tracking). This is inevitable.

Google Glass didn’t die, it just changed its name to Microsoft Hololens; or Project Tango enabled smartphones, or any other AR-enabled gadget coming around the bend.

But what really raises my hackles is when folks compare VR to 3D TV. Although 3D TV was pushed hard by industry as a lucrative value-add, it didn’t really bring any new expressive capabilities to the medium of film/video. VR is a platform that enables fundamentally new formats of content. This is not film/video plus a little something. This is radio to television.

Here’s why:

Presence & Agency

VR’s single big achievement is that it brings the (tele)presence and interactivity (agency) seen in video games to a wider audience by destroying the clumsy interface abstractions necessitated by a 2D screen.

People unfamiliar with game engines can now enter an interactive, three-dimensional narrative universe with a learning curve of zero.

Q: How do I look around?

A: You look around.

Q: How do I walk forward?

A: Walk forward.

Q: How do I peer under the table?

A: You press and hold ‘c.’ Haha just kidding. Just crouch down and look.

Lost in Translation

For a person who grew up with gaming as a second language, it’s hard to comprehend the power and impact of this new paradigm. Sit your grandmother down in front of Unreal engine and get her to navigate the virtual space. It is not intuitive. And accessibility matters. For example, my girlfriend claims she was an avid gamer in the NES days of side-scrolling platformers, but lost interest as games “went 3D and got complicated.” I’m sure she’s not alone.

What she’s pointing out is that navigating a 2D playspace on a 2D screen was intuitive and fun, but navigating a 3D playspace on a 2D screen requires all sorts of mental acrobatics and learning investment.

Consider an application like Tilt Brush. Observe how quickly a novice “gets it” and starts creating. Now consider how many hours of training and practice would be necessary to use an analogous 3D paint app on a 2D screen: Inputs to navigate the 3D canvas; controls to gimbal the virtual camera and the virtual brush; how to set the z-depth of your brush; how to read the gnomon indicating the axis-plane orientations; and so on. For most people, it hardly seems worth the effort.

VR effectively breaks down these barriers. That’s its special sauce.

(And in the near future articulated hand tracking and natural language processing will destroy even more abstractions to agency in VR.)

If you could travel anywhere…

Among other things, this intuitiveness opens up whole new worlds (and markets) of possibility for transportative experiences, the kind of experiences in which The Setting Is The Story. Transportative experiences are a very big deal. What’s the most immersive recreational product people consume today? Travel and tourism. Travel and tourism is a huge market, and it consists mostly of sight-seeing: the simple act of standing in an interesting locale and taking in the sights and sounds and local life and character. I’ve stood in the ancient Hagia Sophia or before the vast falls at Niagara and it’s a hell of a compelling experience, even without bad guys to shoot or a mystery to solve.

Un-abstracted presence and agency, combined with hi-fidelity unified sensorial stimulation produce an effect called immersion, and a large enough difference-in-scale produces a difference-in-kind when talking about immersive experiences.

Watching the Grand Canyon on 4K TV or even OMNIMAX with 10.1 Dolby Surround is not even remotely similar to standing there with your feet on the edge and feeling, on a visceral level, the daunting scale of the landscape in relation to yourself. This effect alone must afford VR a raison d’être; a unique niche in the content landscape that nothing else can fill.

Moreover, destinations can be offered that are otherwise inaccessible, unsafe, historical, or purely imaginary.

The ability to enter into and inhabit a narrative universe — an imaginative and artistically curated alternate reality — was always one of the biggest draws to games for me personally. And if we are to believe travel and tourism industry statistics, immersive transportative experiences are big draw for many others as well.

And that is, in my opinion, what VR brings to the table that is truly unique.

It’s one big reason why VR is not just a fad.