Tech: Lucid Streaming

Originally published in Real Life. Read the full text here. 

Virtual reality can be as immersive as a movie because it doesn’t look or feel real at all

At the beginning of 2016, tech enthusiasts and bloggers predicted that it would be the year of virtual reality (VR). And they were right, in the same way that, say, 1895 was the year of film. Movies were hardly ubiquitous in the “Mauve Decade,” but they did exist, at least as novelty concepts in traveling fairs. VR exists today in mostly the same way. While some enthusiasts own early consumer-ready headsets, most of us experience VR, if at all, at pop-up cinemas, galleries, and expos. And while producers are flooding the market with neat VR “experiences” (the preferred term), we don’t yet have a genuine classic — something like Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), which, more than a century later, is still compelling as a movie and not just as a document of film history.

VR has been conceptualized as a film medium, although it’s not totally clear that it is, or what else it might be. Some of the best VR experiences are games, albeit many with a strong narrative component. Maybe the most beloved product in the VR universe is Tilt Brush, an application owned by Google that allows users to paint in virtual space; it’s thrilling, although not particularly cinematic. Still, many VR directors came up through the film industry, and festivals, from Sundance to Cannes, have incorporated VR into their programming. Much of the current writing on VR focuses on its storytelling potential, and since that storytelling frequently involves actors, cameras, and screens, writers often assume that the technology is at least analogous to film.

To experience VR, you need a headset — the big five are the Samsung Gear VR, the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, Sony’s PlayStation VR, and as of next month, the Google Daydream View — all of which are used in concert with a phone, a computer, or a game console. The devices respond to your movements: Turn your head, and the image shifts in sync, simulating the experience of an immersive, 360-degree screen. (Perhaps the closest analogy to VR is the massive Circle-Vision surround theaters that the Walt Disney Company installed in various theme parks, beginning in the ’50s.) Consumer versions of the major VR headsets all went to market this year — or late last year — but they didn’t become ubiquitous. Most of us still aren’t convinced that they’re worth the price, at least not yet. But 2016 was the year in which VR escaped the silos of the tech industry. Ordinary people are talking about the medium, even making their own works. At last, the over-caffeinated conversation about VR and its revolutionary potential is giving way to sober reflection.

VR supposedly offers the chance to shut out your world and plunge into another one. That promise is embedded in the word immersive — the adjective most frequently used to describe VR — and it’s implicit in the oxymoronic name of the technology itself: “Virtual reality” implies that, while VR is not, strictly speaking, real, it’s so close that you won’t be able to tell the difference. VR is a paradoxical medium: It draws you in and pushes you out. It empowers you in small ways and then robs you of agency. It is perhaps the most compelling new storytelling medium, to the extent that it is a storytelling medium at all. Over the past three months, I’ve visited VR expos and events to get a handle on what the medium is, and what it could be. I listed in my notebook what I see as the four biggest contradictions of VR.

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.