#CES2016: The Year of VR. Again

In 2015, CES headlines were all about ‘The Year of Virtual Reality’ with many of the big (and small) names turning up to the annual Vegas tech pilgrimage touting consumer-ready VR headsets. Only Samsung delivered on the promise, so what happened to the rest?

Oculus held a press conference just before G3 to reveal their final Rift, Sony changed the name of their Morpheus headset to Playstation VR (or PSVR) and HTC postponed their 2015 Vive launch because they’d made a ‘major’ breakthrough. Good on HTC for holding on for a better product, because it’s well worth the wait, the Vive Pre is stunning. The Void broke ground on their first VR theme park in Utah and it’s mightily impressive, but won’t open until later this year.

I’ll also have my hands and eyes on the latest Sulon Cortex this week – but more on that when I’m allowed to tell you…

So here we are again with the usual question being asked “what’s big at CES?” Thanks to the Rift pre-order floodgates opening today, Oculus has ensured It’s VR. Again.

CES has also brought us a raft of 360º cameras (although not all ‘proper’ stereoscopic VR) including the Vuse, the Allie, Nikon’s new KeyMission 360 and Samsung’s Project Beyond. Again.

If we ever have a conversation about Virtual Reality, you’ll soon discover my views cover the extremes and there’s no fence-sitting. I love and will enthuse about the platform’s incredible potential yet have a rather negative view of some of the industry leaders, because some aren’t leading in the right direction and many aren’t pushing hard enough.

Having produced 360º videos for years doesn’t make you a marketing expert. Building great games doesn’t mean you’ll produce stunning VR experiences. The new frontier of VR studio production requires a diverse skill set and a unique understanding of how your audience will view and react to your content, not just how they’ll discover it.

If you stumble upon anyone carving themselves out a career as a VR movie mogul and they’re telling you THE future of film is VR, they’re doing more harm than good. It’s A future and a damn exciting one but claiming all films will one day be viewed in a VR headset with full 360º immersion is naive at best, chronically damaging at worst.

Think of all the movie classics that just don’t need enhancement. They’ve been brilliantly acted, superbly scripted and skilfully edited and that requirement should never go away because the film industry is a wonderful machine. Full VR would not only be cost-prohibitive but damaging to the backbone of the industry – focused storytelling.

No, I haven’t gone all retro on you, I’m not rebelling against the new Virtual world. We need to add value to really make the good stuff great. If everything is VR then it becomes white noise and loses its impact, much the same as the misplaced marketing prerogative of turning every website into an app – that just gives fuel to those that still think the app is dead.

VR is at its most powerful when pushing boundaries, offering the chance to experience the unexperienceable (that’s a word, right?)

Take the storming of Omaha beach in Saving Private Ryan, the Jakku Millennium Falcon chase from The Force Awakens or the thick of the boxing action in Southpaw, Raging Bull or Rocky 27. VR will live or die on its financial relevance to studios. It’s unrealistic to shoot an entire blockbuster but a D-Day beach scene or a single round of boxing become invaluable marketing tools for a cinematic release and an essential added extra for the digital home download. Add episodic storytelling then suddenly you’ve tapped into the micro-payment and subscription models contemporary audiences are comfortable with.

In the same way that we went through a phase with visionary publishers claiming all future books would be interactive, we’re already facing the same issue with VR. Yes, some books obviously benefit from the bells and whistles (Brandwidth’s Doctor Who Encyclopaedia and The Doors apps or our Maleficent and Saving Mr Banks iBooks are perfect examples) but for many, the reading experience needs to be just that – words and images, digested in much the same way they always were, for the same cost. But certain properties deserve more. I received an email last week via the CES Press Portal claiming the ‘real’ sex industry will always be better than ‘holographic 3D porn and teledildonics’. That may well be true, but the VR porn industry will still be huge!

To say VR is the headline act at CES is a little misleading, there’s AR too. Augmented Reality has the potential to hit an even larger demographic than the Virtual variety, simply because the audience doesn’t need to shut itself off from the outside world. The main reason I’m more excited about VR is we’ve had AR on our phones and tablets for years – even desktop PCs and laptops equipped with a camera have been able to display augmented content.

New headsets such as Microsoft’s Hololens have reignited the augmented conversation (and investment frenzy) and Google’s second attempt at Glass appears to be just around the corner, even though this isn’t actually AR but an info overlay within a single screen. Impressive tech nonetheless, but not what we’re talking about here.

If you’re losing patience waiting for the new hardware to turn up and you want to see AR 2.0 in action, grab an ODG headset – it works and has had years of development time and budget. If it’s good enough for NASA and the US ‘three letter agencies’, then it’s certainly robust enough for consumers.

2015 may not have delivered VR and AR as promised, but the potential for 2016 has never looked more real.

E3: The Blockbuster Generation

Hollywood is rejoicing as cinema-goers flock back to the big screen this summer. In recent years the movie theatre experience looked as if it was going the way of the music business, but now the 2015 summer of excess is serving up the blockbusters.

The current box office takings merely provide the warm up act to this winter’s releases where we’ll see the long-awaited extension to the Star Wars franchise following on from James Bond’s November action in SPECTRE.

I have a point to make here, relating to the millennials amongst us (the kids born this millennium) and my time spent at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in LA this week. Having sat through Avengers: Age of Ultron last month, I came away feeling a little despondent and wondering which came first… the story-less all action ADHD blockbuster or the constantly distracted audience?

I had an interesting conversation in the back of a cab last year. I was heading to the airport having just delivered my TEDx talk in Athens, before jetting off to LA for the next big adventure.

I say the talk was interesting, but I mean ‘challenging’. My esteemed car-sharer was a seasoned TED speaker, with years of experience in the field of human behaviour. He held the view that kids today are bombarded with too much information, especially of the digital variety. He believed that mobile devices should be strictly rationed as they cause more problems for kids than they solve.

I told him that I agreed in principal but ‘all things in moderation’ is a better approach than insisting on a non-digital solution. You don’t filter the noise out by turning it all off, you learn to live with it, categorise it and make use of it.

I’d be the first to admit that my kids don’t lead a normal life. The very nature of my job exposes them to a new piece of tech hardware or delivery platform on a regular basis. They are a fabulous sounding board for the reactions of the next generation of consumers as they’re quick to dismiss and not afraid to speak their minds. They have none of the social or business diplomacy to worry about – it just works or it doesn’t.

They’ve been fascinated by and indifferent to various smart watches and VR headsets over the past couple of years and it’s easy to see that a constant supply of digital watch faces will appeal more than garage door openers and short-form film and games are perfect for VR.

At E3, the audience is hungry for new games, but still prefers the familiarity of a sequel and will happily immerse themselves in a single game for hours on end if the content offers enough variety and a continual challenge.

Minecraft is already huge but Microsoft demonstrated a whole new level of immersion at E3 – on HoloLens. If you’re not familiar with this new platform, it’s Microsoft’s foray into the augmented reality market. projecting seemingly real content into the wearer’s field of vision. I’ll be getting hands-on today and will update this article in a few hours.

So where does this leave our kids? Lost in a digital world of shock and awe, content and distraction? Yes, all of the above and it’s brilliant.

I saw the Disney movie Tomorrowland a couple of weeks ago and I loved it. It touched a creative and technological nerve and moved me to write this article. It’s not an explosion-a-second blockbuster like Age of Ultron as it manages to combine an all-action adventure with something subtly cerebral.

It’s a film with a message. Don’t lose your sense of wonder, investigate new technology and be creative with it. Use it to push boundaries, not live within them. We wouldn’t have reached the moon or built electric cars without a commitment to improve the world in which we live. We can also have fun whilst doing it!

It’s our responsibility to encourage kids to live with and use technology to their advantage, rather than distance themselves from it, and a brighter future.