Until recently, virtual reality has been the stuff of science fiction. But last year, Facebook placed a large bet on the future of the medium when it bought Oculus Rift, the leading virtual reality technology company. Oculus VR will start selling its affordable, state-of-the-art setup early next year. Samsung has just released a $99 version of its Gear VR headset. And Google has even made a low-end cardboard device that wraps around your smartphone to turn it into a virtual reality viewer — and, if you subscribe to The New York Times, you recently got one in your Sunday paper. Kurt Andersen visited Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a pioneer in virtual reality research and development, to test drive an experience that’s more realistic than any movie or video game.
Now that virtual reality is within months of becoming a consumer product that costs less than a smartphone or video game console, what will that mean for the future of storytelling? Obviously there will be markets for gaming — and pornography — at the start. But, for some directors, the medium has more idealistic applications.
Chris Milk, who over the last decade has directed music videos for artists like Kanye West and Arcade Fire, is one the first to explore virtual reality film making. But directing for virtual reality is nothing like what Milk learned in film school. Jeremy Bailenson, who directs the Stanford lab, says that’s because shooting in 360 degrees makes it impossible to focus the viewer’s attention on any one thing. “Directors are brilliant because they tell you when to look and where to look. In VR, I get to look wherever I want.”
That poses a number of new challenges for telling a story. But virtual reality has a unique ability to transport the viewer to a different place, turning a movie into a fully immersive experience. Some directors see this as a powerful tool for generating empathy. The Stanford research team has found that wearing a VR headset to virtually walk a mile in someone else’s shoes does have an effect on how we feel about them.
It’s fitting, then, that Milk’s first film is about a real Syrian girl named Sidra living in a refugee camp. He followed that up with one about the Millions March, the protest demonstration in response to the police killing of Eric Garner in New York City, and another inside an Ebola clinic in Liberia. He and his team at Vrse.works just finished a project with The New York Times and Google Cardboard about child refugees.
"There’s something really powerful about sitting in the same room with another person and then hearing them tell you their story,” says Milk. “The way that you feel about them changes. You feel their humanity in a different way. You feel it in a deeper way. It’s different than television, it’s different than radio, it’s different than cinema, it’s different than literature.”
