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EMILY PRICE: Hi everybody.
I'm Emily Price.
And I'm a product manager for Google VR.
I'm here today to talk with you about interactive storytelling
using two of the products that I work on.
So you just heard from my colleague Michael
about VR and AR at Google, which we
believe is the fourth wave of computing that is here,
it's coming, and it's really important for developers.
So just as a quick poll, how many of you
have tried Daydream?
Oh man, that's a lot of you.
How many of you have experience with VR?
That's even more, yes.
So for those of you who haven't, I'm
going to assign you some homework right now.
So by the end of the week, you need
to drop by the Google booth and try some of the Daydream demos
we have there.
There are some things that I really want all of you
to understand about VR before you leave GDC.
Why do we think and why do I believe VR is so important?
VR is going to change the way that we tell stories.
VR gives you the ability to break out of the single frame
and tell a story that unfolds everywhere around you.
And there are three things that, for me, really
make VR storytelling different.
The first one is immersion.
So when you're taking control of people's optical cortex
and all of their senses, you're putting them inside
of a story in a completely new way.
The second one is agency.
So when you start giving people the ability to interact
and they're fully immersed and present in the space,
you have a whole new type of superhero narrative.
You are the hero in a completely different way
than you are on a flat screen.
And the third thing is that VR is really about sharing worlds.
We have the ability to take you and transport you
to another planet, or somewhere amazing on this planet.
Or we have the ability to share the places in the world that
are really important to us and tell stories
about those places that are really
beautiful and meaningful.
And so when it comes to the idea of sharing the world,
that's really where I come in.
So I work on Google Jump, which is a VR camera
system from Google.
I've got one here on the stage if people want to check it out.
And what we're really about is we're all
about giving people the tools to capture the world and share it.
So when I say camera system, I can mean two things.
The first one is the camera itself.
We partnered with GoPro to make the GoPro Odyssey.
And so what the GoPro Odyssey is,
it's 16 standard off-the-rack GoPro cameras,
arranged in a ring with custom firmware
so that they are synchronized.
And they run off of a shared battery
so you don't have to charge all 16 of them
and lose one in the middle of filming.
And here's a quick photo of me going out and capturing
a place that's important to me.
I really love post-apocalyptic stories,
and so I went out and filmed some good post-apocalyptic
scenery.
So the first part really is the camera
that allows you to go out and capture.
And the second thing that we do is we do automated stitching.
So we designed this camera to capture the world
in omnidirectional stereo.
So the 20 second introduction to omnidirectional stereo
is if you think about all of the light in front of you,
capturing all of that light and turning around in a circle
and capturing all of that light too,
we designed the camera to capture the world in that way.
And we take the 16 different videos off of the GoPro
Odyssey, and we stitch them together in the cloud.
We blow apart all the pixels and put them
back together to create a perfect 360 3D stereo video.
It's pretty awesome.
I think I have some demos on my phone
if you really want to see it.
So OK.
So what am I doing here?
Why am I here at GDC talking about VR video?
It's because my favorite games--
I love games, I believe in games.
My favorite games are the ones that are all about the stories.
I love narrative game design.
I love narrative-based games.
And I think that when it comes to telling stories in VR,
bringing together, capturing the world
with narrative-based games and narrative-based game design
is going to unlock some of the killer apps and killer
stories of the medium.
So I'm really here looking for people
who are interested in telling those sort of stories
that are planning projects around telling
those types of stories.
And I would love to talk to you.
So if this sounds like your project,
if you're looking at blending VR video and interactivity to tell
a story, I want to talk to you.
I want to help you.
So if this sounds like you, please get in touch,
please come find me.
I'll be here all week, I have pink hair, I work for Google.
And I would love to talk with you further about VR video
interactivity and storytelling.
Thank you so much.
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