October 07, 2024
Virtual reality will completely transform movies. VR will take over as our primary source for stories and storytelling, a role handed down from oral storytelling, books, live theater, movies, television, and most recently, first-person games like Quake and World of Warcraft.
To clarify, let me say that it's my belief that in 20 years, VR (and AR) will be our primary platform for work, education, communications, and all kinds of entertainment. It's worth pointing out that the distinction between VR and AR will fade away within 10 years because economical head-mounted display systems will emerge that unifies both open (AR) and closed (VR) experiences into a single platform. Having said that, I will limit myself here to discussing immersive VR storytelling as it relates to movies. (It'll be fun to speculate about how blended VR/AR systems will impact storytelling, but that's a much wider playing field - literally.)
Storytellers creating content for VR, as well as first-person video games today, face a challenge that their predecessors never faced: audience members can simply wander away from the action, missing important moments in the story, unwittingly degrading their own experience. In the olden days, oral storytelling and books allowed us to imagine the world from our own points of view - a movie in our mind's eye - but the storyteller still had absolute control of our attention. We went where the storyteller took us. The storyteller's control over our experience applies to theater, movies, and television as well: our point-of-view is locked to the stage or camera, and we watch as the story unfolds in front of us.
Of course, it will still be possible to create similar experiences - passive "VR movies" where we're locked into a seat, carried around by the producer-controlled camera. We'll be allowed to look around by turning our heads, but we won't be allowed to wander from the producer's chosen viewpoint. It's reasonable to assume that many of today's TV/movie producers will think about VR production this way. I suspect that most people will be perfectly happy with it, frankly, because it's a perfectly viable paradigm for passive entertainment. Hollywood will likely make plenty of money off of passive VR movies. However, when VR is used that way it devolves into a simple gimmick, with VR providing only a marginal improvement over today's 3D movies. The approach, while workable, misses the deeper potential of the VR experience: we can literally enter the world, participating in a story where we control the actions of a character. We won't just be viewers anymore - we'll be actors.
Hints of the potential for interactive storytelling have been around in various forms for ages. We've seen it in "choose-your-own-ending" interactive theater productions, as well as "interactive books" with branching storylines, like Choose Your Own Goosebumps and Cliffhanger, where we're asked to choose between a set of alternative plot directions. In the past 15 years, we've seen an expanded form of that in video games with free-roaming worlds like World of Warcraft. Passive entertainment isn't likely to ever go away, but the larger future lies in interactive experiences.
The producers of these experiences are no longer simple storytellers. They are world-builders, designing complete worlds. They define the rules governing the world, like "yes, physics still applies" and "you are a soldier on a planet being attacked by evil aliens". They create the landscape - the planets, buildings, dark forests, where the story takes place. They choose a hierarchy of challenges/goals that define various stages of "winning". They create reactive AI characters and place them into the world to help or hinder us. In short, the producers create a place where something interesting will happen, but the exact details are left for you and me, playing our roles, to decide. We (the actors) move through the world, discovering the rules, facing the challenges, interacting with characters, and the story reveals itself as we go. In fact, we will often feel that we're actually living in that world. This is the draw of today's first-person games, and it's a huge draw that VR games will expand upon.
Remember: the video game industry's overall sales now rival the movie industry's. Both industries did approximately $100B in sales in 2015, but the game industry is growing, while the movie industry is dwindling slowly. (By comparison, the book industry - all books, of all kinds - took in about $30B in 2015. The live theater industry worldwide took in about $5B.) The reason for the shift in revenues from movies to video games is simple: our tastes are shifting away from simple "watching" experiences and toward more complex "acting" experiences. It's a generational thing. People under 40 spend more of their time playing video games than they do watch movies or TV, and first-person console games are the most popular (and profitable).
The "VR movies" I described above may well provide a lifeline for the movie industry because passive immersive experiences will still be dramatically more visceral than anything previously seen. Some have argued that VR is just a feeble gimmick, like 3D and giant-screen theaters. That may be true for some uses of VR, as I mentioned earlier, but remember that less than 100 years ago moving pictures, sound, and even color was considered gimmicks, too. Moving pictures quickly supplanted live theater, and adding sound formed 95% of what we currently think of as "movies" today. The color was more of a gimmick, yes, but it's useful enough that it's still used in 99.9% of all movies today. By comparison, I think that the jump from flatscreen movies to VR movies will be as transformative to the storytelling experience as the jump from silent films to talkies 80+ years ago.
The ability to look around freely cannot be overstated. Imagine watching the movie Halloween but in VR. Think about how the experience changes when you can look around and see Michael Myers in the back seat of the car (and in passive VR, there's nothing you can do to save Annie Brackett). Scared yet? Now imagine flying beside Jake in Avatar, being able to look around at anything you want, and being the first to see the giant red truck swooping in overhead (but you can't warn Jake). Exhilarating? I hope those examples illustrate a new aspect of the movie-going experience.
The transition to acting in the movie will change everything. Imagine entering a virtual world where you're given freedom of movement, freedom of choice, and freedom to act as you see fit. The story follows you. You are Annie, and you have at least a small hope of avoiding Michael Myers' attack. You are Jake, and you are responsible for dodging and outflying the deadly truck. In both cases, failure will be fatal to your character (and you'll have to start the level again). Imagine that you can be virtually any character in the story, matching wits with villains and monsters, solving puzzles and saving the world, chasing bad guys or running from the cops. Imagine being anyone you want. Each world, each story, is waiting for you - the creator.
Oh, this is going to be so much fun!
