MD's Roy Taylor discusses what's
going to be big for VT in 2017. He said there be more complex content, and experiences good enough you’ll be willing to pay for them.
Roy Taylor is 'the VR guy' at AMD.
His official title is corporation vice president - content and technologies,
but what this really involves is working with the entertainment industries to
help them produce better and more engaging VR experiences.
Better VR means more
people and companies buying VR kit, which require much more powerful graphics
chips than your average PC - so if it takes off and AMD's marketed itself well,
the company will sell more graphics cards (and chips inside laptops and the
PS4, which has its own VR helmet in the PS VR).
Hollywood-based, and working with
the film and game industries (and the 'digital entertainment' space that sits
somewhere in-between), Roy has an overview of where the industry is headed. Ao
on a recent trip to London, I caught up with him to hear his views on the
challenges and opportunities for VR in 2017. Of course, working for AMD, his
insights are coloured by AMD's heavy presence in high-end VR but not in mobile
(ie, phone-powered) VR. But in 'desktop VR, AMD is almost platform-agnostic - its
chips powering PCs that support both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and inside
the PS4.
Before looking to the year ahead, I
asked Roy's perspective on where we are now - for which he has a clearly
well-prepared answer. "We're at the roughly
equivalent to about where the film industry was in 1905," says Roy.
"In 1905, the Kinetoscope had been out since 1891, so the first pieces of
content were just starting to be made, but it was with the introduction of the Nickelodeon [early cinemas] in 500 locations
across America when it took off.
"We're kind of in the same
place now. We know that [VR] offers immense promise, particularly in film. -
and to a lesser degree in games. But we haven't yet got the killer piece of
content that makes us all rush home early, and give up our Christmases, neglect
the kids, because it's so awesome.
"This is going to come along -
VR going to 'happen'.'
Roy says that the biggest issue that
the industry has right now is the relatively low number of users/potential
customers for content creators. He quotes Jon Peddie Research's stats that
750,000 VR headsets will ship before the end of this year - with 2.7 million
more shipping next year.
"So in the next year, it will
be still an installed base of around four million," he says. "Even if
he's wrong by a 100 percent, it's still [only] eight million.
"A key issue we have is that
modern content today costs around a million dollars a minute to make.
Interestingly, it's the same for whether it's [a game like] Battlefield 1 or [a
movie such as] Ghostbusters. You've got to find a business model which will
support those levels of investment. If you only have an installed base of four
or eight million that's not big enough for you to go and get revenue of say
$400-600 million.
"Roughly speaking, both games
and movies are looking at a 4-to-1 ratio, so you spend a 100 million to make it
you want to make 400 million. That's how you cover other costs. We need a
bigger installed base."
Location-based
VR
The best way to get more people to
use VR, says Roy, is what the industry calls 'location-based VR'. This is a
catchall term for high-end VR experiences that take place outside your home
using VR kit provided by the theme park, museum, shopping centre, cinema, film
festival or games arcade that they're located in. Notable examples we've
covered include the Game of Thrones exhibition experience, the BBC's Spacewalk (below, which debuted at DocFest in
Sheffield), and the VR rollercoaster ride at Six Flags in the US.
These not only make money for the
content creators - assuming that audiences are willing to pay extra to
experience them, as they used to for '4D' rides and arcade games - but if
they're done well, they encourage people to buy the hardware to have their own
VR experiences at home. And if enough of them do, that's when VR becomes 'a
thing' rather than a niche pastime.
Hardware alone can't achieve
mainstream success for VR - compelling experiences is what really makes the
difference between VR being a fad like, arguably, 3D and a
must-have-that-becomes-the-norm like HD. Loving what you play/experience builds
the word-of-mouth that spreads the medium virally, like playing WipeOut on the
PlayStation round a friend's house in the early 90s made us all want to go buy
PlayStations.
While we've seen a lot of VR content
from companies with backgrounds in games, post-production, VFX and film - it's
the latter that Roy thinks likely will produce the best VR experiences in the
immediate future. It's not that the others can't - he cites Bethesda's VR
version of Fallout 4 (below) as one of the best VR experiences around - it's
just that filmmakers have the most experience at telling the compelling stories
that will really engage people.
"The film industry knows how to
use technology to tell stories. They've been doing that for a 120 years. I just
spent the morning with 200 of them [at an event at BAFTA] and they're very keen
on the technology - as long as it's used to help tell the story, not get in the
way.
"[They get that] the greater
degree of the immersion, the greater degree that we like it. One of the best
pieces of VR from that point of view is Paranormal Activity (below), because
even though you're in a room and you know people are staring at you, you still
get frightened. It still makes you jump. I think they do a terrific job with
that."
Roy also mentions The Martian as an
example of a notable film-related VR project. However, he notes, it wasn't a
complete success with audiences.
"I took an aggregate of the all
the online reviews I read," he says. "A lot of people liked it a lot.
But at $20, they thought it was overpriced. They did not like the cutscenes.
When I experienced it, I didn't like the cutscenes either, but I did like the
interaction [and] the narrative. I thought the end of the experience when they
shoot you off into space was terrific."
This illustrates the challenge for
VR content creators. We're still experimenting with the form, but we need to
keep giving customers experiences that don't put them off. And as/if the
audience grows, we've got to adapt to the changes in who those users are - both
their interests and experience with VR. The non-interactive parts of The
Martian that didn't appeal to the early-adopter gamers who played might have
appealed to a wider audience.
What we have learned so far, Roy
says, is that some formats work well and others don't - and that the human
brain can take in a lot more information in VR than it can in on a 2D screen.
"There are certain situations
where you will never want to replace having control of the camera - romances
for example. Romance doesn't lends itself well to VR," he says. "On
the other hand, big complex scenes with lots of camera angles do lend
themselves very well. [At BAFTA] I showed two clips that are very good example
of where VR would work even better than a traditional camera.
"One is the donut scene from
Boogie Nights (below) - one guy shoots another guy, who shoots another guy and
then everyone's dead. There's nine different cameras angles in five seconds,
because it's complex to follow everything that's going on."
Roy says that our brains would have
processed that scene in VR better - as we would in reality - because our brains
are designed to take in a lot of data from a three-dimensional world almost
instantly, in a way it doesn't from a flat screen. It does that because, back
when human beings were at the mercy of predators, our lives depended on it.
"The second one I show is the [Battle of The Bastards] battle scene from Game
of Thrones. Towards the end of the battle, [one side has] lost and they're
completely surrounded. Then the cavalry turn up.
"There's a lot of characters in
that scene and you're trying to follow the plight of the characters. You have a
lot of close-ups. Then you have distance shots to try and allow you to take in
the fact that they're completely surrounded. Then finally when the charge
arrives, there's a lot of aerial shots so you can understand what's taking
place. That would have been great in VR."
VR
for families?
In contrast to those last two
scenes. The last successful big leap in how we interact and experience content
was with gestural control from the Wii and Kinect. A large part of its success was
driven by families - but VR is very much for adults only. I'm not talking about
VR porn, but that VR headsets are shaped for adult heads. There are also
concerns about what VR experiences could do to children.
"Whether it's suitable for
children, I think that that still needs to be worked out." says Roy.
"The answer is to commission the research and I don't believe that anybody
has done that yet. They're just being cautious by saying 'this is not for under
13 year olds."
Physical and psychological issues
aside though, Roy sees a lot of potential for VR for family entertainment and
education.
"I think one of the most
wonderful pieces of VR so far is Google Earth," he says. "It's
fantastic. I had a VR setup in my house over Thanksgiving. We had the usual Thanksgiving
friends over and [Google Earth] was by far the most popular [experience] hands
down. Everybody loved that, going in and exploring where they came from or went
on holiday.
Roy mentions a story from a contact
who had trekked across the Himalayas when he was younger - and liked to go back
and retrace the route he took using Google Earth - and it's easy to see how the
immersion could bring those locations to life for students too.
No comments:
Post a Comment