Virtual reality up until this point has primary revolved around the gaming industry. Oculus Rift, one of the front-runners in the virtual reality space, was purchased by Facebook last year which lead to many believing that the company would pull the device away from the gaming industry. Today’s announcements and premieres put proof into that pudding.
Today, the company demoed its first interactive virtual reality movie “Lost” at the Sundance Film Festival. This film was directed and created by Oculus’ newly announced film production department, Oculus Story Studio; led by the former Disney and Pixar director: Saschka Unseld. Lost is a short story where you’re in an enchanted forest and experience a giant robot finding “his/her/who knows” dismembered arm. Notice that I used the word “experience” and not watch, VR films has the potential to change the way we enjoy films forever, but opinions vary.
TechCrunch described the experience as, “Cute, Immersive, But Hardly Interactive” with their biggest complaint being a lack of interaction with the movie and being “stuck in one spot the whole time.” On the other hand, Brian Bishop from The Verge described the experience as, “the future”, “immersive”, and “dude!” It will be interesting to see the reaction of the general public to such demonstrations.
“Lost” wasn’t the only film that was demonstrated. Another film known as “Perspective; Chapter 1: The Party” allows you to experience the perspective of two different individuals in a college assault scenario. The 12 minute film is broken into two parts enabling you to experience the situation from the perspective of both the male and female in the situation giving perspective into both sides of the coin. Thankfully, it only showed the events leading up to the act. While certainly a cringeworthy film, the potential to educate and experience multiple perspectives has enormous opportunity to help us with short-sightedness.
The technology is years away from being ready for the general public. The Oculus Rift is currently still in beta testing and is intended for use by developers. Sony has also announced their own Virtual Reality solution known as “Project Morpheus,” a PS4 companion to be used in tandem with the Playstation Move motion controllers. Sony has not revealed concrete details on when they will release their device to the general public either.
If you’re interested in experiencing Virtual Reality now, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear VR is going to be your best bet. The device allows you to use the screen and sensors of your Galaxy Note 4 in tandem with the goggles, optical technology, and additional sensor within the Galaxy Gear VR to experience movies, games, and applications in new ways. If you have a Galaxy Note 4, it’s currently available now.
While you might think that making a Virtual Reality headset available to all movie recipients in a theater would be more expensive than a movie theater screen, think again. The average cost per screen in a movie theater is $518,000 with the average number of seats ranging between 100 and 200 seats. With the Oculus Rift currently priced at $350 for the developers kit (rumored to be even lower once released as a consumer model), a full theater of 200 headsets would set a theater company back only $70,000, over 86% less than the average cost per movie theater screen. This could be a viable option if they can make space for the immersion “movement” factor of VR movies.
Hopefully, Virtual Reality movies will become a mainstream consumer option sooner rather than later. Now film makers just need to better figure out the technology and begin creating more compelling cinematic experiences to push the technology forward. What are your thoughts on VR movies? Would like prefer the added immersion? Or does the thought of standing, crouching, and looking around seem like a tiring iteration of your favorite lazy activity?
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