COVID-19 and the immersive industry
By: Verity Mcintosh
Tags: Covid 19, Immersive Storytelling, Virtual Reality

From concerns around headset hygiene, to VR parties bringing hundreds of isolated people together, there are some pretty distinctive pro’s and cons to being in the VR/XR industry right now. In our various makeshift home offices, the students of UWE Bristol’s masters in Virtual Reality and I recently talked through what we imagined to be some of the biggest risks, and opportunities for the virtual and extended reality sector at this unique moment in time.

A place to come together

Like so many people, the students and I are trying to rapidly adjust to working exclusively from home, and keeping a considerate social distance from one another. All of a sudden Teams, Zoom, Hangouts, Skype and pals have become our primary modes of communication, and we are all doing our best to maintain meaningful connections with colleagues, friends and family.

lance weiler from Colombia’s Digital Storytelling Lab just shared a great article on the immersive potentials of video conferencing platforms.

In class, we have also been experimenting with teaching in virtual reality, meeting up in one of the larger social VR platforms, AltSpace to try out and invent some rooftop games, play an educationally dubious round of ‘Holograms Against Humanity’ and scamper from one virtual ‘room’ to the next trying to explore and unpack what this is all about.

Students coming together in AltSpace for a chat about the phenomenon of meeting in Virtual Reality

The graphics and avatars might look a bit basic, it is surprising how quickly we each committed to the scene, and to our ‘digital twins’. Straight away we were talking and gesturing enthusiastically to one another, showing one another around the various spaces, and starting to use the affordances of each environment to amuse one another. Teleporting somewhere we weren’t supposed to be able to get to quickly became a fave. Several times I lost track of a student, only to hear them call out to us from the ‘wrong’ side of a seemingly impenetrable window pane, or tightrope walking along a wooden rafter three stories above us before jumping back in our midst like a lo-poly Spiderman. It was bizarre to watch someone plummet from 20m up, and then resume a conversation about presence and embodiment without missing a beat.

Just hanging in the rafters!

For me the main take away is that there seems to be something uniquely physical about being in a virtual space. We are simple creatures, and a few clever audio and visual cues in a headset can all-but convince us that we are no longer sitting in our living rooms with screens strapped to our faces, but that we have been transported somewhere else, somewhere remarkable, and even more remarkably, that other people have been transported here too.

Unlike a video call, in VR we have spatial awareness, there are personal space boundaries to be respected, and a sense that we may be able to do something, as well as just talk about stuff together. This dynamic can feel intimate, adventurous, and uncannily normal, as though this were just somewhere else we have gone to hang out. In a time where little of our social behaviour feels normal, this can be pretty comforting. We will definitely be doing it again.

Forbes offer a useful run down of some of the main platforms tailored to virtual working, design, education and socialising here.

Creative log jam

One of the main ways that creators have been launching immersive works in recent years is through the international festival and conference circuit. This has not always been the healthiest ecosystem, as the tyranny of the film festival-style ‘premiere’ without an established distribution network has been fiendishly limiting for non-game content…but that’s another story for another time.

Even before we all went into lockdown, most event organisers were acknowledging that the practical, hygiene considerations of event-based VR meant that everything had to be called to a halt. Even the most diligent invigilator with a box full of face shields, and wet wipes up the wazoo cannot mitigate for the fact that devices you touch with your hands, then put onto your eyes, then pass on to the next person are not the thing right now.

Needless to say, the cancellation of all such mass gatherings for the foreseeable future has dealt a hammer blow to creators and exhibitors worldwide. Publishing platforms such as Steam and the many Oculus stores can be useful alternate means to get work to audiences, and arguably there has never been a better time to release content, as people fortunate enough to have headsets at home are voraciously seeking out new experiences.

Unfortunately however, this is an early moment for all of such platforms, and they still tend to favour particular modes of content they imagine will drive attention, often quite unimaginative translations of established gaming formats to lure engagement through familiarity. It can be very difficult to punch through when you do not fall into an establish gaming genre , and the selective nature of walled-garden platforms like the Oculus Quest store are notorious tricksy to break through. Couple this with the fact that many of the immersive storytelling experiences pushing the form forward have been designed as LBEs (location based experiences) which tend to be hybrid digital and physical experiences, often integrating physical sets, presuming the presence box office systems, of expert invigilators, decompression spaces etc, all of which have now evaporated, for the time being at least.

It is possible that concerns around hygiene, will also depress sales of headsets for use in the home, certainly where shared use is anticipated. Forbes recently published a useful piece on Coronavirus: Practical Hygiene Advice For Virtual Reality Users to support those still comfortable using the equipment to stay safe.

The students were at pains to point at that these clouds are not without silver linings. As with undertaking a masters programme, time outside of the normal churn of things can afford us a rare opportunity to take stock, to unashamedly invest in our own skills, to explore new processes, to take the time to make and mould the work into what we would wish it to be. With the ever receding horizon of public exhibition, when public virtual encounters do return, it seems likely the content waiting in the wings will never have been richer.

Paisley Smith, creator of interactive VR documentary Homestay, recently published a series of mini-interviews with leading VR/AR makers and commentators to finding out how this has affected them, and how they are coping with this new normal.

Some festivals are taking the plunge and moving wholesale into virtual events. Last week, the 2020 IEEE VR conference, scheduled to take place in in Atlanta, was instead hosted in VR via Mozilla Hubs, seemingly with very few changes to the planned programme.

IEEE Virtual Reality conference — image via Dr Aleshia Hayes @AleshiaProf

Despite this bold move, VR is still far a long way from being a familiar feature in most homes, so platforms such as these often have 2D modes for people to follow along in the browser on their laptops/phones should they so wish. I’d love to see the data on how many people remotely attended relative to the previous event IRL, and how many of those attendees did so in VR.

If you’re interested in attending events that have moved from somewhere with carpet tiles and queues for the loos, into VR, Tony Vitillo aka Skarred Ghost is keeping track of them here.

Impact on the adoption curve

It felt borderline inappropriate, given the exceptional times we are living through, but in our conversation, the students and I also attempted to take a long view for what this could mean commercially for the XR sector in the future.

Catherine Allen, CEO of Limina Immersive and MA Virtual Reality advisory board member often points to the Technology Adoption Curve (Moore, 1999) to describe the current commercial status of VR/AR/XR, and the challenge of moving from an early, enthusiastic minority to a more sustainable early majority.

Technology Adoption Lifecycle, “Crossing the Chasm” (Moore, 1999)

Catherine tells us that “Immersive Media is currently poised to cross” this infamous “chasm” and what happens next will inform whether this technology becomes a mainstay of our media landscape, or a footnote in the history books.

More often than not, it is the quality and availability of content, rather than platform that makes the difference when it comes to adoption (I am merrily binge-watching the new series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, not ‘doing some television’). Despite some incredible work being made in the last 5 years or so, we are really only now starting to see titles that pull large audiences to VR. Last year, rhythm game Beat Saber was one of the highest ranking games (VR or otherwise) on publishing platform, Steam. Just last week, Valve released the latest edition to their much-loved Half-Life series, a VR-only title, Half-Life Alyx. On launch day, 43,000 people were reported to be concurrently playing, and reviews have been effusive. It is currently ranking as one of the top ten games of all time as defined by user reviews on Steam. You can expect to hear a lot of hideous sales-chat from silicon valley types in the year ahead referring to this as the ‘killer app’ for VR .

Half-life Alyx by Valve

As people reach the limits of their Netflix subscriptions, it seems reasonable to imagine that global demand for in-home virtual reality equipment and content will rise in the coming months.

If we extrapolate forwards and this exceptional moment causes more people to regard VR as just another part of their domestic activity, it seems equally likely that this interest will persist after some degree of normality is restored.

As one of our students points out, however, this is all contingent of people being able to afford, get hold of and use the kit in the first place. Early high-end rigs have been notoriously expensive and can require a high level of tech confidence and IT literacy to install and maintain.

More recently, some of the hardware released has clearly been designed for a more general consumer market. The Oculus Quest is regarded by many as the new hero of the field as it costs less than most phones, does not need a separate computer, offers full 6 degrees of freedom (run around your living room) VR and is super easy to get going with, straight out of the box. Hooray!

Except…you will struggle to get your hands on one right now. The supply chain has been heavily affected as the manufacture of consumer electronics, including virtual reality equipment has slowed, almost to a halt by the need for workers in China and nearby to self isolate.

One student speculated that China is likely to begin its recovery phase, just as the US is going into a lockdown phase, which purely commercially may mean that the supply and demand could correlate advantageously for an upswing in US ‘in home’ adoption of immersive products.

Maybe this really does change everything

A lot of our conversation was caveated with ‘it really depends how long this all lasts’, i.e. if it everything goes back to normal soon, chances are the impact on the immersive sector will be negligible. However if it goes on for many months, even as we feel the cultural and economic impact in the years ahead, we may well become acclimated to a way of life that seemed impossible just few weeks ago. NBC News recently speculated that The coronavirus pandemic drove life online. It may never return.

For one of our students, Rebeka Igneczi this is particularly concerning when it comes to at home VR usage: “There is talk of a ‘rush to VR’ as a solution for a lot of the issues we are facing with having to self-isolate and work from home, both in terms of social needs and in terms of work. The concern is how fast this enthusiasm for turning to VR to solve our problems came — the situation of having to be home alone has barely begun (at least in the UK) and already we are looking for how to escape rather than solve our issues. There is no problem with finding alternatives for meet-ups and events and VR does seem to be a good idea for it, but it needs to be weighed equally with trying to work on getting back to normal, going outside and seeing actual human faces in real life.”

She continues “We can consider the dependency of phones and laptops as a comparison to addiction to VR and conclude that one is not worse than the other, but the issue here is that there seems to be an enthusiasm to fill the hole left by not being able to go outside and socialise with VR. It can be a solution for now (given people have access to the gear and technology in the first place…), but it needs to be done carefully, with the intention of working towards having things back to normal in the future, rather than accidentally going down a Black Mirror-type route where the dependency on VR takes over.”

For others, behaviour change could be a positive outcome. In Time to Love the Web Again, Katerina Cizek points to an encouraging surge in online co-creation in response to the current crises. Rachel Ginsberg from Cooper Hewitt notes that this is the time we can start really listening to disability and climate activists and recognise how potent remote connection can be, and how inaccessible the requirement of physical presence can be for many. Her excellent article Designing for Now: The Implications of “Going Online” here.

The masters students also discussed the impact of international events and collaboration moving into to virtual or online spaces. If this can start to feel normal in this extra-ordinary time, it may have a longer term effect, conditioning us to consider alternatives to air travel when we want to be together in the future.

Ultimately, only time will tell what difference this moment will make in every corner of our lives. I am personally grateful for the community of students, makers, researchers and connectors who are here to talk about it, and who are supporting one another in big and small ways everywhere I look. Onwards.