2016: A Year in VR

2016 has been a great year for VR - so much has happened. It’s hard to believe that 12 months ago, we hadn’t been treated to the joys of firing arrows with a virtual bow in The HTC Vive’s ‘The Lab’ or the rush of shielding yourself from heavy fire in ‘Space Pirate Trainer’. There has been an onslaught of releases of both hardware and content, all taking place alongside a big exploration into what is possible, what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve seen a lot of great questions being asked, and a lot of great solutions found. Methods have been realised to teleport around spaces without walking (ideas seen in ‘The Lab’ on the Vive have been improved on in experiences such as ‘The Gallery: Call of the Starseed’ and ‘Raw Data’); we’ve seen answers for navigable UI's and central, app-launching home-screen locations devised on platforms like the Daydream; and intuitive ways to view and navigate across traditional and new content in headset (both ‘Google Earth VR’ and ‘YouTube VR’ do this fantastically well).

The release of PSVR has bought VR gaming into closer reach for many, allowing high-quality VR gaming at a lower outlay cost – and at a great level of quality – whilst the Daydream is opening up Mobile VR content to a broad crowd when at home or away.

The recent release of the Jump Camera rig, a collaboration between Google and GoPro, promises to improve and make the capture of stereoscopic 360 video easier, as well as easing the process of stitching it all together using image recognition technology, which was previously an extremely expensive and time consuming process.

In addition, there has been a huge amount of activity to the side of the main players, with exciting, expanded field-of-view headsets (StarVR) or multiple player tracking in huge, warehouse scale spaces, enabling truly massive VR playgrounds (Modal VR). But overall, one thing that no one can ignore is the level of buzz around VR – the last 12 months has really seen this rise to a deafening level.  Great ideas are plentiful, but in the next 12 months, we’ll expect to see these ideas expanded and, I’m hoping, a couple of real standout experiences that break-through the enthusiasts and get noticed in the mainstream.

Has it reached its potential?

Not at all – VR’s potential is only starting to show. Since the release of the Vive (followed by PSVR and updates to the Oculus Rift), we’ve seen a split in VR to two distinct directions: Mobile and Room-scale. Both have a solid place in the landscape. 

Mobile VR currently lacks the ability to detect the user’s position in physical place, so detecting if the user leans forward or steps backwards is impossible.  However, this fixed positioning has the advantage in that it’s easier to create content for it; for example, you can shoot on the Jump rig or render out animations from your favourite 3D package in your studio. There are some great examples of what is possible, not least our VR experience ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ for Daydream.  Mobile is a great place for cinematic experiences that look gorgeous, allowing you to explore and experience a story in an entirely new manner.  Viewers will soon be able to interact and navigate around filmic spaces, ‘finding the story’ rather than being ‘told the story’. This method of storytelling will owe much to interactive theatre.

Room-scale VR has the benefit of the user being able to move around the physical space, backwards or forwards, as well as look around and interact with objects using extremely accurate controllers. But on the flip-side, it’s tied to game engines rendering in real time and so can lack in visual fidelity.  Room-scale VR, with its general reliance on game engines, lends itself very well to gaming - and we’re starting to see great things come out of it.  Early in the year we saw ‘The Lab’, a suite of games and demos that ships free with the Vive, giving new users a great example of what is possible, and this was then furthered later in the year with games such as ‘Batman: Arkham VR’ on the PSVR. The next steps are now building these out into longer, fully fledged games that are challenging and provide hours of content.

Is it entering the mainstream now?

VR is as close as it’s ever been to being mainstream now, and I’m excited for the post-Christmas rush to see exactly how many new people own a headset and are joining in on VR. Having a headset at home is very different from using one in a studio or being demoed one in a store or at a conference. It opens it up to the casual browsing of videos and the potential to spend hours in games and experiences unaware of the time that has passed.

It used to be that I’d only ever see people on my social feeds posting pictures of their friends wearing them in the latter (the studios, the conference), but now I’m seeing people in my network in homes using PSVR, for example. Many of my friends purchased the Google Pixel phone and are now in-home owners of the Daydream View headset. Though we’re still at the stage of the early adopters, we’re on the cusp of it breaking through.

Once people are comfortable using a headset at home, it then increases the likeliness that they’ll use them out in public, like on trains and planes. It may seem like a stretch now, but VR content, when done right, is extremely entrancing. The potential for emotional reach to the viewer is huge, and the ability to get absorbed into content is extremely powerful - as long as the content is done well. There aren’t a huge amount of experiences yet that hit this mark in terms of emotional creative content, but Google Spotlight’s ‘Pearl’ and the experience ‘Notes on Blindness’ are very successful examples.

And what developments will we see in 2017?

I think some of the most useful applications of VR in the short term this year are an evolution of the tools that we use to create content. I work in a studio that made its mark in VFX and we’re excited at the idea of moving a lot of our tools into VR, even if we’re not displaying the final content in it. Our modellers can create 3D sculptures by using controllers based in 3D space and so sculpt their scenes in a much more organic manner. Layout artists can lay out the sets for animated films standing within the space itself, not constantly having to tumble a viewing camera around to see a window into it on their screen. We’ll also see apps like ‘Tilt Brush’ and Oculus’ ‘Medium’ become more and more mainstream as people master the processes to create great quality content with it.

As more people begin to understand the medium, it’s inevitable that we’re going to see some groundbreaking content. 2016 showed us a taste of what we can do, so we owe it to 2017 to build on that, taking the concepts and putting forward something more refined. There is no excuse for putting out simple, low quality, mono video and calling it VR anymore. Instead, look for a great game that is custom-designed for VR and really captures the medium, or a cinematic VR experience that is fully fleshed out and hits at a deep, emotional level.

We’ll also see a big social aspect start to infiltrate VR. We are social beings, and VR has the ability to join people together and connect. We’ll see avatars as a primary means of engaging with people, being able to occupy shared virtual spaces (as just seen with the ‘Room’ feature that has been recently released for Gear VR) to watch movies or play games. The idea of sharing a space when the users are in two entirely different locations is something that has only been hinted at fantastically in games on the Vive such as ‘Rec Room’ and is often overlooked as an extremely powerful component of VR.

It’s also important to note that while VR isn’t going away, it isn’t necessarily going to turn out as a lot of people think. It’s not going to replace screen-based content, and we need to be honest about its limitations – like the fact that you have to wear a headset that covers your face for video. But, it’s too useful and has too much power as an emotive medium to be ignored and not explored.

Overall, expect the unexpected. What we know is that a lot of our current concepts don’t translate into VR - traditionally conceived, shot and edited films don’t work, nor do the previous standards in first person shooters for anyone without an iron stomach. However, new content methods are starting to bud, and new styles of games are coming out. Something will break through, much like the world of social media broke through on the web. We’re starting to see clues, and ideas are being born. All this makes for a hugely exciting 2017 ahead.