Consumers Need to Be ‘Eased’ Into Viewing of VR ‘Storytelling,’ SMPTE Hears
HOLLYWOOD -- With rise of virtual reality “storytelling,” the rectangular “frame” for displaying content “will be as quaint a memory as the theater,” cinematographer Andrew Shulkind told the SMPTE Conference Tuesday. “In an age of rapid acceleration, that time is coming faster than we think.”
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Shulkind thinks 360 video “has removed the frame from our content experiences,” he said. “While not terribly new, there’s still a ton of opportunity.” He sees “content in the round” as the “natural successor to passive, rectangular viewing experiences, even if it presents some obvious storytelling challenges,” he said.
Much “experimental” VR content “violated the unspoken rules, making people sick” or “confusing the audiences” about where in the content “they’re supposed to look,” Shulkind said. That makes people understandably “anxious about the future viability of the medium,” he said. Viewers need “to be eased into the new practice of finding a story or following multiple ones,” he said.
Shulkind sees a “tidal wave of technologies coming down the pike that stands to upend” the content creation business, he said. "We have to be more than technicians.” The VR business “isn’t refined enough yet to have cogs and wheels,” he said. “Think much bigger." SMPTE engineers can be “role-builders” in VR, he said. “The slate is wiped clean. Let’s do it right this time. Let’s take ownership of this new medium, and rewrite the rules of the diversity of stories and the diversity of who tells them.”
Though a “slew” of VR and mixed-reality headsets have been released, “the goal of where this business is going has to start with the content,” not with the displays, said Shulkind. “That’s what has to drive the technology,” because “the fidelity of what we capture on the day doesn’t even make it onto the display,” he said.
Headsets are the “hangup” as for why so much VR content is restricted to short-form videos or to gaming, said Shulkind. Headsets will be “a big piece of the business,” he said. “But the idea of headsets, having to put something on, that’s the barrier of entry.” As industry starts migrating toward lighter-weight headsets “that aren’t as taxing and you don’t have to plug in to wear a backpack ... you’ll start to see” longer-form VR content, he said. “It’s hard to wear the thing for more than six or seven minutes.”
SMPTE Notebook
Challenges abounded for NASA in working with Amazon Web Services to produce the 4K video stream that was broadcast live from the International Space Station (ISS) to the NAB Show in April, said Rodney Grubbs, imagery experts program manager at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Despite the 10-second “latency” delay in communicating with the ISS crew from the podium at the Las Vegas Convention Center, “the program was well-received,” said Grubbs. “The challenge to the rest of the industry is, hey, if we can do a live program in UHD with audio from the space station, then why don’t we have more live UHD content right here on good old planet Earth?” said Grubbs. The line drew applause.