VR Can Be the Film Industry’s Future, but the Barriers to Entry Are Surreal
[PhilNote: this very good article is about VR experiences, not creating experiences in VR.]
A stately man identified only as Tom, who helped Simon organize the event after meeting him at a weekly VR town hall event called “The Evening News,” put the globe-spanning gathering in context. “This is just a cool exemplification of what VR can be,” Tom told the crowd. “An event in one part of the world is now an event for the entire world. It’s amazing that someone living 5,000 miles away would find this personal.”
In early March, as it became clear that crowded events would become impossible for quite some time, I purchased an entry-level ticket to VR with the Oculus Go. As it turns out, there is a whole world entirely free from COVID-19 hiding in plain sight.
VR can’t replace Cannes, but it will play host to Cannes XR, a virtual reality market with virtual parties; VR can’t replace moviegoing, but it has hosted premiere screenings and Q&As for films that had been scheduled to play at canceled festivals. And VR can’t replace filmmaking, but it’s a platform for storytellers finding new ways of exploring the medium.
[VR is] the ultimate panacea to sheltering in place, where people can gather without inhaling the same air in immersive spaces.
One quiet Saturday night a few pandemic weeks ago, I dropped into a Reggie Watts performance in Altspace and had a blast. Watts, whose boundary-pushing performances blend standup, beatboxing, and jazzy, discursive music layered across a dense set of tracks in real time, has exactly the kind of category-busting persona that makes sense for the VR space. As I watched his cartoon avatar flit about the stage, addressing multiple rooms at once while the audience gathered around him, I was swept up in the euphoria of experiencing spur-of-the-moment creativity in a crowded room. Watts used the technology to his advantage, leading us out to a virtual balcony for his climatic performance, where he invited the audience to set off fireworks that exploded into large images of his face across the sky. It was a dazzling, surreal, and otherworldly feat.
See the full story here: https://www.indiewire.com/2020/06/virtual-reality-could-save-film-industry-1202234384/