SWAPNEEL KSHETRAMADE: Hey, everybody.
My name is Neel and I'm a program manager over
at the Google+ team.
I'm also an author of this publication on Medium
called "Storytelling in VR."
I hope you'll check it out after you hear what I have to say.
So after the headset explosion in 2014-- well,
the headset announcement explosion, really,
in 2014-- people started discovering
a lot of applications for VR.
I mean, gaming, education, sports, communication.
And they're all good ones, but the one
I want to talk about today is movies, narrative
entertainment.
[ONE PERSON CLAPPING]
Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
One person, thank you.
But you all should be interested,
because movies are big business.
2015 projected revenues for filmed entertainment
about $90 billion US dollars.
And these are projections.
Digi-Captial-- take it with a grain of salt.
But virtual reality revenue is projected
to be around $30 billion by 2020.
Movies are going to be a big chunk of that.
A lot of that is gaming, sure, and headsets,
but movies are going to be a big chunk of that.
So a lot of people have been trying to figure out
how to make movies on VR.
It's not the easiest thing to do,
but there's a bunch of studios that have come up.
There's Oculus Story Studio, there's
Felix & Paul in New York-- oh, sorry, they're in Montreal.
Chris Milk is in New York, and we've
got our very own sort of ATAP Studio.
If you guys haven't seen "Help," you have to.
It's incredible.
But there's a lot of problems sort of identified
with making movies in VR.
People are trying to apply the rules of movie-making,
and they don't really work well.
I mean, in movies, story is told through a frame.
So if you have sort of two guys having a conversation,
there's a framing shot.
And then throughout the conversation,
there's cuts to one person, then the next.
And there's reaction shots and all that.
And suppose an explosion goes off in the background.
They pan out and show you the explosion,
and then zoom in debris, the aftermath, reactions,
all that good stuff.
It's all in the frame.
The director tells you what to see and points the frame at it,
and that's all you get to see.
In VR, the viewer is in your environment.
There is no frame.
They're immersed in it.
They don't know where to look.
You don't know how to tell them where to look.
Without cuts, how are they going to pay attention?
If they miss a crucial bit of the action, what happens?
I mean, what happens if there's an explosion
and they're looking the other way?
So let me tell you a story.
100 years ago, the Lumiere brothers invented the camera,
and for the first few years, they didn't really
know what to do with it.
I mean, there were little films like a train pulling
into a station, which was literally just a train
pulling into a station.
Or there were market scenes, scenes of everyday life,
some slapstick comedy.
And in 1903, this guy called Edwin Porter,
he worked with Edison, he made a movie called "The Great Train
Robbery."
It's a 12-minute movie about these four bandits
who hold up a train, and they're killed in the shootout
afterwards.
It was remarkable for two reasons.
One, it was the first complete story told on film.
I mean, Edwin Porter invented a new sort of visual language
for how to tell stories.
He had cuts, he had cross-cuts between different locations,
he had camera angles, and movements, and close-ups.
And towards the end, there was a shot
where the lead bandit essentially just fires
a gun at the audience.
And for somebody used to watching live plays,
I mean, that's huge.
I mean, somebody is firing a gun straight at you,
but it was a movie.
It was incredible.
And the second reason the movie is remarkable
is because it kick-started the global movie industry we know
today, with the Hollywood, the Bollywood,
and all the other woods around the world.
So indirectly, Edwin Porter is responsible for "Star Wars,"
"Game of Thrones," and "Breaking Bad."
So you've got him to thank.
Let me-- oh, there we go.
So the VR movie really needs its train robbery moment.
We need to figure out how to make this happen.
Let me skip ahead a little bit.
So what are the key elements of a VR experience?
I'd say there are two of them.
One is that it's immersive.
You have a headset covering your eyes, your ears.
Down the line, you could have body suits
that let you feel what's happening
inside the environment.
People are coming up with treadmills and spheres
and stuff like that.
All these are accessories, and I know that a lot of consumers
don't have them.
But this is a vision talk, so I don't
have to talk about practical concentrations.
Point is, let content drive adoption.
Make good movies and then people will buy stuff just
to watch the movie.
And the second one is interactivity.
So it's great to be immersed in a scene,
but it's not engaging unless you can interact
with it in a meaningful way.
And there's a lot of ways that we can sort of get signals
from viewers-- track their eye movements, track their hands.
If they say something, sort of see what they're saying.
Maybe down the line, you have sensors
that can track temperature, blood pressure, even heart
rate, brain activity, I don't know.
All of that could go into sort of customizing
the experience just a little bit for every viewer.
Now, I don't mean to say that it should be a game
or a choose-your-own-adventure kind of situation.
That's not it.
You're telling a story.
There has to be an overall arc.
There has to be conflict, drama, characters you can relate to,
an inciting incident, escalating, tension,
resolution, and all that good stuff.
But you can have interactivity in small ways.
For instance, that conversation we were talking about,
two people at a table.
Now, what if one of them or both of them
occasionally glance across at this third person,
the viewer, who is sitting at the table with them?
Or somebody cracks a joke and nudges the third person,
and that person feels it through their haptic body suit
or something like that.
It's the little things that go towards increasing presence
and making the viewer feel like they're
a part of the experience.
Another way we could do that, for instance,
is let viewers be a character in the story.
I just want to play this little clip for you.
This is from a cut scene from the "Arkham Knight."
Watch this cop.
He's our character.
And as he walks towards the diner,
the camera sort of swoops in and essentially becomes him.
From that point on, you're seeing everything
through his eyes.
He's a character in the scene.
The viewer is now a character in the scene.
Other characters come up and talk to him
and stuff like that.
This is just different ways of presenting the story.
It's ideas, but I hope you guys will sort of altogether
come up with this new visual language
that we need to make virtual reality movies really
compelling.
Hang on.
Let me get out of this.
This is stuck.
Ah, there we go.
There we don't go.
Hm.
Anyway.
Point is, the thing with movies and movies
today is that it's the same experience for everybody.
It's filmed once and everybody sees the exact same movie
for as long as it's there.
There's nothing customized to the individual.
A virtual reality viewer has a headset on.
It's a viewership of one.
We should be able to take this opportunity
to sort of make it a unique experience for that viewer,
have them come back and have different experiences
every time they come back.
So good luck and--
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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