American Cinematographer - March 2017 - 59

There's a lot of collaboration between
the new school of VR filmmakers and
the traditional filmmaking crowd
to evolve this medium into something
interesting.
For interactive VR, the challenge
is more, 'How do you make something
photorealistic for, say, 90 seconds or
more?' You also have to find effective
ways to introduce interactivity and adapt
that experience to the ways humans are
used to interacting. Another challenge is
creating visual appeal with a high degree
of polish to an audience using today's
hardware and headsets.
David Stump, ASC: The principal distinction to understanding the
divisions in VR is degrees of freedom,
or DOF. Photographic VR is
currently firmly seated in 3 DOF - or
arguably 3.1 if you include photographic
3D systems - with its angular-deflection capabilities of pan/tilt/roll and, in a
limited amount, left- and right-eye
perspective. In computer-generated VR
for the gaming world, you have 6
degrees of freedom, or 6.1 with
left/right eye; you have the same
pan/tilt/roll angular-deflection capabilities of photographic VR, plus linear
deflection, which is the ability to move
and change your position left/
right, up/down and forwards/backwards.
Robert Stromberg: There's a
very important symbiotic relationship
between the creative and the technical,
and one cannot succeed without the
other. When I first saw VR three and a
half years ago, it was a combination of
what I had seen when we were developing technology for Avatar. I was blown
away - but not at the image quality,
which I knew would get better. We need
to increase the comfort level for adopters
with smaller, lighter, higher-resolution
untethered headsets. It's all going to
improve.
Who are the VR consumers?
How much demand is there, how has it
increased of late, and how does it
project to increase in the future?
Stromberg: I think we'd all agree

A fleet of Jaunt One VR cameras stands at the ready.

the first adopters are gamers. As that
segment grows, a lot of other practical
applications - such as travel, medical,
etc. - will splinter off and be successful.
You have the choice of watching something in a movie theater versus going
home and turning on the Xbox, and the
option of playing a game versus experiencing an emotional story.
The hardest part is explaining
VR to the uninitiated, but once you see
if for yourself you become convinced.
There won't be an immediate explosion
in demand; it will take time. It will be
more like a slow-burning fire. For
instance, you'll see more and more
advertising to make it compelling,
because the average person has no idea
what VR can bring to their lives.
Spohr: People have an immediate 'wow' factor to the visceral experience in VR. Millennials and
post-Millennials are the first
consumers, as they love to take in tons
of content. But you can still give that
headset to grandma and grandpa, and
the exhilaration they experience
demonstrates this is a medium for
everybody. The gaming industry will
drive the platform initially and get VR
into people's homes. Ambisonic sound
is also so important; we see sound as
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having the ability to direct a viewer's
attention in the way a close-up has in
traditional cinema.
Stump: There's an age- and experience-based reaction. VR is a more
alien experience for someone very used
to being a passive observer who is then
asked to be more participatory. For
younger and less experienced viewers
who are used to first-person gaming, it's
less of a shock to the system. It's much
more difficult to be a passive observer in
VR than an active participant. You
wouldn't call watching The Martian a
participatory experience, but there's The
Martian VR Experience piece; there,
the creators' intent is much different
from the movie, and it's to make the
observer more participatory.
Safreed: On mobile VR, a lot of
the interest is around video consumption because it's a natural extension of
the device - these are not room-scale
devices with 6 degrees of freedom. The
higher-end headsets like the Vive and
Rift are very much dominated by games
right now; they're also fine as a video
device, but you wouldn't necessarily go
to your game rig to watch a movie in a
virtual theater. Mobile is simpler to set
up and faster to get into for shorter periods of consumption, where you put it on
March 2017

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 2017