“Virtual Reality: technology and prospects”, — the first Skill Bill master class of a new 2016/2017 academic year, took place on September 20th, 2016. Its three-year tradition, that the opening event by FILM.UA Faculty is happening within KIEV MEDIA WEEK International Media Forum. The master class was lead by Tom Burton, the leading innovation and technology expert at BBC Studios, department of digital storytelling (UK), the author of Home: Spacewalk Experience – a well-known project for a virtual trip over the International Space Station, BBC innovation project manager.
Even though Tom spoke on Skype, the audience had a feeling of full contact and there was some Q&A. After Tom Burton, Yuri Prylypko, CEO at Postmodern, continued on the topic.
The master class began from a short retrospective introduction into VR. Tom recalled it that the idea of virtual reality goes back to as early as the 90`s with movies like “The Matrix” reaching the highest peak of their popularity. But back then, no technology could allow making it comfortable for the end user and reasonable for the content developer in terms of its cost. Genuinely being in a military domain, virtual reality had an enormous potential in the segments of entertainment and education.
Nowadays the technology became easier and cheaper, due to the development of mobile devices among other things. Palmer Lucky, VR Education developer, decided once that he should create a page for Kick Starter and raise funds for Oculus Project. This turned out to be one of the significant milestones that predetermined the technology’s fate, because it meant nothing else but investment into the future. Then Valve, the world’s largest independent videogame developer, starts working on their own VR project, Vive.
Now, what do we have today? 3600 works both with and without glasses, using mobile devices becoming a certain “windows to the brave new world”. Using mobile devices shows smaller viewer involvement rate, but that is a new breathtaking experience. And whenever we put the glasses on, we find ourselves up to the neck in a totally different reality, changing each time we turn our head this or that way.
In Tom’s view, nowadays VR is mostly functioning based on CG due to special applications. The most widespread field of use, and by far not the only one, is computer games. Depending on the purpose, there is a basic VR interactivity – with only glasses involved, and advanced VR interactivity – wherein, apart from the glasses, additional elements are used, which transfer the user’s movement to VR as well. The more we involve the user into VR, so much the more our brain believes what is happening is real. Enhanced VR technology with additional gear is called VRX. As an example Tom told us about a flight imitating solution made by Universal, where, apart from human movement registration, there is a special ventilator directing air current into the participant’s face depending on flight characteristics. In view of our expert, the future belongs to technologies like this one. Tom quickly mentioned augmented reality (AR) as well.
Concerning the devices needed for VR, Tom separated them into two categories: the more expensive ones, controlled from PCs or game consoles, and the cheaper ones, controlled from mobile phones. Tom briefly characterized main devices available on the market nowadays, saying that mobile technologies look more promising right now, allowing to use your smartphone without a need to buy any additional gear.
As far as platforms are concerned, Tom mentioned four major points of content placement: application stores such as App Store, Google Play, Oculus Store etc., the Internet, public platforms such as Facebook, YouTube etc., as well as special branded platforms. The latter include Discovery VR and The New York Times.
“VR is a way to transfer information, and not a peripheral”, says Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios.
Advantages of the format:
Without taking into account all VR achievements, this technology is still lacking decent directors, which does open a lot of opportunities for content developers. Tom enhanced his words with a great deal of examples, helping understand the capabilities of VR today. Among them are sports broadcasts, wherein whoever does not have a ticket to the stadium can be able to watch the game from the best seats possible, visiting distant corners of our planet and communication with idols of your time; a possibility to comprehend the feelings of someone living in drastically different conditions such as refugee camps; a chance to experience all your most fantastic dreams coming true.
Tom told us as well in details about some projects made by BBC: live broadcast from the Calais refugee camp, broadcasts of the most famous shows such as “Dancing with the Stars” and “The Voice of the Country”, as well as about such projects as Rome's Invisible City, The Olympics 360, Home: Spacewalk Experience, Easter Rising: Voice of Rebel, The Turning Forest. He also mentioned “Walking with Dinosaurs”, a brand new project presented just the day before the master class.
So what about the prospects? Digital technology go on changing the world of media, and VR is actively participating in this. VR can be used both for the purposes of entertainment, information presentation, and education.
Right now:
According to statistic, in 2018 the amount of VR users is expected to rise up 171 million. And according to Juniper, by 2020 AR and VR will have become a $150-billion industry.
What is important:
“These are first steps, so stay tuned!”, - Tom says.
Tom Burton was followed by Yuri Prylypko, CEO at POSTMODERN.
Yuri turned the attention to the fact that the main risk of failure of 3D technology is relevant to VR as well. Because every viewer is really susceptible to influences of these technologies, poor quality of the project implementation may well scare the audience away and practically destroy the technology. Thus the main focus should be on creating top notch content. Unfortunately, the overall state the industry is in now, wouldn’t allow to stream and watch even the high quality content.
Nevertheless, VR can potentially quickly stabilize and start generating profit. The major goal to reach here is a critical mass of devices and content attracting more and more users that will potentially ensure profit of the industry.
Creating VR history differs from ordinary content at every stage. The most attention should be turned to the stage of the history development.
The key issues according to producing and distribution:
One more direction is using VR in animation.
In his speech, Yuri Prylypko approached augmented reality as well. At the moment, his company released an augmenter reality enhanced game within the advertising campaign of “The Stronghold” movie. POSTMODERN is a VR & AR pioneer in Ukraine where it works on VR & AR content development at par with global corporations.
Let us thank you all for your taking part in the master class, and we are looking forward to seeing you at the forthcoming master classes of FILM.UA Faculty!
