VR is not only the ultimate creative canvas, but also the ultimate content creation tool.
VR as the Final Creative Medium — the Imminent Need to Democratize VR Content Creation
VR is the ultimate canvas and tool. Here’s why we need to make it accessible during this formative period of the final creative medium.
Outlined below are excerpts from my recent AMA on Commonlounge’s VR community. In this question with touch on VR being the final creative medium and the importance of democratizing VR content creation during this formative period.
Q: Why is Virtual Reality the final creative medium?
I believe VR/MR/AR is both the ultimate canvas and the ultimate tool. Traditionally, humans have had a few creative mediums at our disposal, and their essence has been largely unchanged over the years. We’ve had the 2D rectangular canvas — whether it’s cave paintings and impressionist masterpieces of yesteryear, or film and video today. We’ve also had 3D canvases enabled through architecture, sculptures, theater and more recently real-time and offline CGI. And of course we have the written word, voice and music.
VR gives us the ability to leverage the power afforded by all prior creative mediums, mashing it into something that is greater than the sum of its parts — closer to a dream state than anything else. That’s the gold standard for creative expression as I see it — being able to turn your mind inside out and share your dream state. VR lets us do this more accurately than any other medium has in the past. It enables artists relish and leverage the old but also create something entirely new.
While the technology and capabilities will undoubtedly improve, the spatial canvas will stay the same — it’s the closest we get to reality, and even transcends it. I thus can’t help but feel that VR is the final creative medium.
VR is not only the ultimate creative canvas, but also the ultimate content creation tool.
Q: Interesting note on democratizing VR content creation. I’m a big fan of OpenAI, which is doing the same in the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning. My question is, how much tougher is it for a layman to create VR content than say a YouTube video? What needs to happen to bridge the gap, and are there any fundamental breakthroughs that will be needed to make it happen?
A: Great question. Big fan of OpenAI myself. VR + AI itself opens such utopian or orwellian possibilities, but I digress… Currently, the issue hampering access to VR content creation is that it’s immensely interdisciplinary and the pipelines are very much in flux.
Generally speaking, to make VR you need to have an understanding of game design, traditional film/video, visual effects, UX/IxD/human factors, architecture, psychology, CG programming, 3D/spatial sound, camera optics and even AI fields like Computer Vision and NLP. By no means exhaustive, but the list goes on…
It doesn’t help that you’ve got a slew of mediums under the umbrella of VR, ranging from monoscopic 360 videos to full blown game-engine powered experiences, each requiring a different combination of skillsets.
So while it’s easy enough for someone to buy a Ricoh Theta to shoot 360 video or download Unity to make a VR experience, making something good is far more nuanced and easier said than done. There’s no iMovie equivalent of a 360/VR post-production tool yet.
Even for prosumers and professionals, the workflows rely heavily on plugins and custom scripts to extend existing professional software and hardware (that’s already out of the reach of the masses), not to mention software/industries that conventionally never spoke to one another, now have to as a matter of necessity. For instance, if you’re making a 3D visualization tool for enterprise — you’ll likely have to default to Unity and Unreal, but best of luck finding good prefabs or assets that enable easy visualization of complex data sets inside a game-engine. You’re likely going to write that from scratch, even if Salesforce gives you that Rest API for the data.
Producing content/experiences for VR is expensive, there’s a lot of duct tape involved and these two reasons alone keeps most creatives away from medium. And while VR creation will naturally get democratized over time (think making a website today vs 1998), it’s far more critical that we have as many unique voices early in the game, as the experimental successes and failures of the next few years will shape the medium for decades to come.
We already know VR has spawned entirely new mediums that transcend film or theater, and are closer to sharing dream states than anything else. In other words, VR truly does let you turn your mind inside out. So let’s ensure the minds that do it are a diverse and sensible bunch :)
To bridge this gap and ensure that VR achieves its true potential, what we need is more people evangelizing this medium to creatives from diverse fields and democratizing the creation of VR content with novel VR-first tools. We’re already seeing the equivalent of tools like Microsoft 3D Movie Maker by startups like MindShow today. We need more of that. More tools like Oculus Medium and Google’s Tilt Brush. We need the iMovie for VR. The HitFilm for VR. Not to mention native VR support in incumbent creative tools. All of which is a tall order, but I have faith we’ll get there.
Then: Microsoft 3D Movie Maker
Now: MindShow
Next? We’ll just have to wait and see…
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You can also check out the entire Q&A by heading over to Commonlounge, “a network of invite-only communities for discussing curated news and hosting AMA Sessions with industry insiders.”
