Location-Based Entertainment
Is it the movie house of the next century?
After years of hype, virtual reality is finally becoming an industry. The tools exist to build photorealistic digital environments that either mirror reality or create whole new worlds. The economics for large, medium and even small virtual reality installations are good, providing developers with the promise of a high rate of return on their investment.
Even the prospective audience, which includes all ages and sexes, is in place to push VR technology and location-based theme park attractions into a multibillion dollar entertainment business that could be larger than the movie industry. The only thing missing is the content.
To date, the most widely known installations, from Battletech in Chicago to Star Tours in Anaheim, CA, are action-packed and content free, as they say, obviously modeling themselves as large-scale video games. At this year’s Digital World, the creators and technologists sitting on the “Virtual Reality and Location-Based Entertainment” panel were unified in their belief that if VR installations are really to become “the movie houses of the 21st century” — motivating people to leave the comfort of their homes and interactive television sets — developers must produce experiences that include real stories with characters as well as visually stimulating environments.
Panelists included David Smith, chairman and CEO of Virtus Corp., maker of 3D modeling and visualization software; Diana Gagnon Hawkins, a consultant and applications expert in the areas of interactive television and virtual reality; Thomas Dolby, musician, composer, producer and artist, who is working on three separate VR installations; and Bran Ferren, senior vice president of creative technology at Walt Disney Imagineering, the division of Disney developing virtual reality-based theme parks.
MAKE THE TOOLS EASY TO USE; THE ARTISTS WILL COME
Smith opened the session with a sneak preview of a new visualization application that supports QuickTime movies on the Macintosh. It appeared — even in its beta version — to make it incredibly simple to build 3D “worlds.” The new program renders the images in real time, so creators can immediately see the results of their handiwork. “Just as a painter would not be terribly productive if he had to wait five seconds or five minutes to see the result of a brushstroke on the canvas, neither is it productive if you have to wait to see the results of what you are doing [when building a virtual world], as you are doing it,” explained Smith.
As he talked, he created a 3D building — complete with windows, doors and a TV set, of course, showing a digital movie — surrounded by trees.
Building worlds.>> “Think of [the emerging VR market] like the movie industry when it first started,” said Smith. “They not only had to make the movie but the camera. That’s where we are today. Many people today say, ‘Hey, we have the camera.’ Now we need to make the transition to make the content. But in order for people to make a good story they have got to have access to this kind of technology.”
In many ways Smith is banking on the artists and creators being drawn into the VR medium by easy-to-use tools. Already some of the Hollywood community has adopted Virtus Walkthrough, a 3D modeling and visualization tool for the Mac and PC. Most recently Sidney Pollack used it while directing The Firm to block out scenes before they were shot, and set designers, he says, like Virtus because it is interactive and the sets are “recyclable,” so that they can be used again.
MOVING VR INDUSTRY FORWARD THROUGH EDUCATION, RESEARCH
For those uninitiated in the world of virtual reality entertainment (about 40 percent of the audience), Diana Hawkins outlined the highlights (and the “lowlights”) of passive simulator rides and helmet-based immersion experiences.
“You are there.” Passive simulator rides, which include a film with a fast action point of view such as going on a roller coaster ride or going down an alpine trail attached to a motion base platform, are the number-one attractions at amusement parks worldwide, according to Hawkins. They appeal to the entire family, not just the video game generation.
The larger installations, such as Disney’s Star Tours, seat about 50 people at a time, are highly “themed” and very expensive to produce. In fact, because the films, which are about three to five minutes long, have such demanding production values — the visuals are very high resolution — they might even cost more to produce than a full-length feature film, Hawkins said. Many of these rides are actually based on movie properties such as Back to the Future and RoboCop III.
The medium-size, location-based theme rides, such as the Iwerks Turbo Tours unit, can contain as few as two seats or a row of seats on a motion base and are installed in shopping malls and hotels such as the Excalibur in Las Vegas. Unlike the larger installations, the films change on a regular basis in these installations and there is a higher number of repeat visitations. The smaller units are movable and travel around to trade shows or county and state fairs.
LBE and VR complexes.>> One of the major drawbacks of these rides is that they are brief, and, generally speaking, people are not willing to get into their cars and drive somewhere for three minutes of fun. “If you are trying to create an out-of-home experience for large audiences, you must create an environment around the rides, similar to going to a movie,” explained Hawkins, who added that some developers are building large location-based entertainment complexes that house a number of installations as well as food and beverage stands.
One of the other negatives of passive simulator rides is that they are passive. “The next generation audience is the Nintendo generation and interactivity is something we are really going to need to hold them,” she explained.
FLYING, DRIVING, SHOOTING: IS THAT ALL THERE IS?
To date there are only a few interactive virtual reality sites open to the public in the United States. They are flying, driving, shooting experiences that replicate the video game “story” model — if you can call it that.
Who put this sneaker on my face? And while the novelty factor of putting on a VR helmet and data glove draws large crowds initially, there is a low repeat visitation rate for these experiences. In part, Hawkins believes, that is because putting one of those helmets on after several people have used it “feels like putting someone else’s sneaker on your face.”
In addition to sanitary problems (and the unwillingness of some people to muss their hairdos), these installations present numerous drawbacks. Unlike passive simulator rides, VR experiences require an attendant to get you in and out of the helmet, which is time consuming. Also, these VR experiences are based on stereoscopic 3D images, which 10 percent of the population can’t see. In addition, the graphics are not yet even to the quality level of video arcade graphics, which is completely unacceptable to audiences weaned on television and motion pictures.
Last but certainly not least, some of these experiences make people, well, want to throw up. “If you have ever seen when the pterodactyl in Virtuality picks someone up in the audience, it makes (some) people physically sick,” Hawkins said. “It presents a bit of a clean-up problem.”
Cooperative vs. combative software.>> Software is going to make or break this market, according to Hawkins. And she believes (as did the audience, based on the applause) that it’s time “to get away from doing simply boy games.”
“We know everyone will go in and drive flight simulators, shoot people,” she said. “My argument is that we don’t know for sure that is what people want to do since that is all we have ever given them. We need to be more creative. We need to create a story within an environment.”
Baby, you can drive my car.>> Hawkins believes virtual reality experiences that use networked vehicles within a site are a positive step in that direction. Although she did not name any specific installations doing this today, she said these experiences are comfortable, easy to load and unload, and the cars can be networked, so people playing the game within a site can collaborate. In addition, individuals can play different roles within the vehicle, so there is interactivity. Finally, these experiences are based on “highly pristine, quality images.”
THE POTENTIAL OF VR TURNS ARTIST INTO ENTHUSIAST
Thomas Dolby is aware of what is wrong with VR today — “dumb content and cheesy graphics” — but he remains a true enthusiast because he believes that if the artists become involved in the creation of VR, it has the potential to be an extremely powerful entertainment medium.
Dolby has just finished scoring the music for three simulation ride-films. He is also working on a CD-ROM game and a VR installation for Intel Corp., which will appear in a major New York City museum later this year.
Experiencing Mozart anew.>> Dolby did not want to end up “apologizing for the graphics from the beginning” of the Intel project, so he decided to emphasize the audio aspects of the experience, since the technology to create high-quality digital audio is here today and is inexpensive, while the graphics processors necessary to create gorgeous imagery at low cost are still a couple of years off.
His installation is based on a favorite piece of music from Mozart. He recorded it digitally using “world class” musicians, then let the experience itself dictate the kinds of images he would create. “They didn’t need to be photorealistic,” he said. “In the same way in which our museums are full of great paintings — sometimes a few brush strokes on canvas by the right artist can actually communicate more to you than a photograph — I think you can do something really useful in VR with the amount of pixels and polygons we have already.”
Tickle me for bluegrass.>> Dolby chose to create a concert hall that the audience could “wander around and hear the music from anywhere they went.” Individuals can get on the conductor’s podium, stick their heads next to a violin or even go inside a ‘cello and listen to the music from that point of view. (You can, using your data glove, even tickle the first violinist who then starts to play Appalachian bluegrass instead of Mozart.)
“It’s very simple,” Dolby said. “It’s not something a backroom technician would have come up with because they probably would have wanted to get too clever, and I didn’t want to take away from the charm of a classical music experience.”
Making music interactive.>> Most recently Dolby has been tackling the problem of how to compose music for interactive experiences. “The whole thing about interactive entertainment is now the audience is in the driver’s seat, so if they are making up the movie as they go along, how do you write a musical score for the movie?” he asked.
Dolby has adopted an object-oriented approach to scoring for interactive. “I was always a big fan of Peter and the Wolf,” he said. “Each character has his own melody, and that idea works well for interactive.” He gave the audience a sample of his work in this area, which will appear in a CD-ROM game later this year. The score is generated in real time as each of the characters (or objects) come together, so it is always the same elements in a different context. “For instance, if I play you a musical box playing Brahms’s Lullaby, you’re going to think what a sweet little baby, but if I put a drone underneath it in a different key you’re going to think the kid grew up to be an ax murderer.”
Dolby believes it is critical to get other artists involved in the VR creation process, and has set himself up as a lightning rod to attract other creatives. He started a company in Los Angeles called HeadSpace, which has already signed on several composers and sound designers (and is looking for more), who are interested in developing the audio aspects of virtual reality installations.
“As an artist, I think it’s really important that creative minds apply themselves to doing something useful with virtual reality and with these other new platforms becoming available,” he said. “I don’t think that is happening very much at the moment.”
A TIME WHEN VR CAN EVOKE A HUMAN EMOTION
As both a technologist and a creator who has been working with VR technology for the past 20 years, Bran Ferren provided a reality check on the state of virtual reality. It was not pretty, but it certainly had its humorous moments.
Ferren, who believes that the “stuff we are dealing with now is just awful, even embarrassing,” said that evangelizing about VR today is “a little bit like sitting down with Orville and Wilbur Wright and trying to convince them of the advantages of the AAdvantage program of mileage credit.”
It’s tough, he said, “because experimental evidence suggests that all this stuff we are showing people now is exciting on an intellectual level but it’s not yet exciting on an experiential level,” he explained. “That’s something that deeply interests me.”
Like his fellow panelists, Ferren firmly believes VR will not become something we can care about until it combines good stories with good environments. “The fact is, until we get to the stage that the quality of the idea and the quality of the presentation give us the ability to touch your heart as well as just your curiosity, we are not going to see this live up to its potential.”
The ultimate communication tool.>> That said, Ferren summed up what seemed to be at the core of most of the panelists’ experiences: that VR has the potential to be the most valuable new communications tool in human history.
“Every time throughout human history we have increased the communications bandwidth to a human being either going in or going in and out in any significant way, it has changed the course of civilization. What is so exciting to me about VR is it is the ultimate bandwidth communicator. When it is done properly, which will not be in 15 minutes and hopefully in less than 100 years, it will be unobtrusive, whether it be the sunglasses or the RJ-11 jack installed in the side of your head, it will let you get pictures into you at the same resolution that you have the ability to see; it will let you get sound into you at the same frequency temporal and spatial resolution that you hear.”
Ferren said that humans are “sensing junkies. We like to fuse our sensors. VR gives us the ability to make that fusion take place in a synthetic environment. And it is potentially an incredibly significant tool to communicate interpersonally and as a society — both on the level of fantasy and serious stuff like education.”
Janice Maloney