Virtual reality is a technology that could actually allow you to connect on a real human level, soul-to-soul, regardless of where you are in the world.
Chris Milk
Virtual reality is the 'ultimate empathy machine.' These experiences are more than documentaries. They're opportunities to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
In virtual reality, we're placing the viewer inside a moment or a story... made possible by sound and visual technology that's actually tricking the brain into believing it's somewhere else.
I was born into a world in which the most compelling stories are through film. But that wasn't always the case. Everything changes; everything evolves.
We build camera rigs tailored specifically to the story we're trying to tell or the shot we're trying to capture.
If there's a new HBO series, you know there's going to be a certain level of storytelling mastery - that you can trust it.
Film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own.
I've played in bands myself, and sat on the floor photographing some of the greatest bands in the world while they rehearse. What's always struck me is how different the sensory, especially auditory, experience is when you're in the middle of the music with the musicians playing off each other around you.
It's easy to lose the humanity when you start showcasing tech.
I knew a bit about the capabilities of HTML5 and have always had a preoccupation with technology. I wanted to delve deeper, to see what else it could do. The technology becomes the palette that you make the artwork with, your palette and your paint.
Where I stand, or where the people I work with stand, is the technology is inevitable, so it's about how do we steer it.
Music scores your life. You interact with it. You listen to it in the car. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl.
Every digital video player - RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Vevo, Hulu, YouTube - all of them had different ways of getting you the video, but it was still always the same series of rectangles. The format never changed.
Journalism is about bringing people to an event or something that they couldn't attend.
With Street View, you're curating a data set capable of incredible emotional resonance for the person interacting with it because everyone grew up somewhere. And if your house is in this dataset, that's going to provide some emotional context for you.
I think there's a little bit of a danger of a hype machine that puts forth a whole bunch of experiences that aren't great, and then a whole bunch of audience comes and don't have great experiences.
Virtual reality started for me in sort of an unusual place. It was the 1970s. I got into the field very young: I was seven years old. And the tool that I used to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle.
My primary goal is always to tell a story that will resonate with people on a deeply emotional level.
As entertainment and storytelling move in the direction of more immersive environments, binaural sound will begin to play a larger and larger role in those experiences.
What we want Vrse to be is a collection of the best in class - the greatest cinematic VR that you can see, and a place that you can trust.
For a long time, I believed that a great piece of music on its own could do more to stir the soul than any other single art form.
It connects humans to other humans in a profound way that I've never seen before in any other form of media. And it can change people's perception of each other. And that's how I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world.
Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there's a multitude of different endings.
Your head is a stereo input. The density and cartilage of your ears embed certain extra characteristics into stereo sound sources. Your brain decodes that and gives you sound plus conscious directions.
There's three things that you need for virtual reality to work. You need the hardware that's affordable and doesn't make people sick, you need an audience that is willing to pay for it, and you need the content.
A bad version of a virtual reality video makes you vomit in your headset in under 10 seconds. It's much easier to make bad VR than it is to make good VR.
With virtual reality, I'm not interested in the novelty factor. I'm interested in the foundations for a medium that could be more powerful than cinema, than theatre, than literature, than any other medium we've had before to connect one human being to another.
I want to figure out what comes after cinema as the gold standard for storytelling.
I didn't want to be a storyteller when I grew up; I wanted to be stuntman.
If you've never mixed paint, you aren't going to be able to paint properly.
All these experiments I've done over the years with technology have been asking whether I can tell stories that affect humans in a deeper way than I could without the technology.
I prefer making stuff to talking about how I made the stuff.
So much of journalism is conveying a place and time that existed, to someone at a later date: giving a person the context and trying to make them feel as informed as if they were actually there.
Virtual reality is already affecting people on an emotional level much more than any other media, and it has the potential to scale: all you need is an attachment for your cellphone, and you can have this experience.
In virtual reality, it's more about capturing and creating worlds that people are inhabiting. You really are a creator in the way the audience lives within the world that you are building.
It's weird: you do a TED talk on something, and people think that you suddenly have a lot of answers around the topic.
When the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by looking at the camera in a movie, it's generally been used for comedic purposes, rather than feeling like they're looking into your soul.
As a species, the look of another of our species into our eyes has a great power. It can mean a lot of different things: aggression, love.
When people ask whether virtual reality will be a real thing or just the next 3D, what I always say is, 'Take a headset, walk outside, and the next person you meet, put it on them and see what the reaction is.'
My premise is that there's something hardwired into our DNA, that we as a species came and evolved from caves and clans and tribes, and therefore, we as a species care more about the things that are local to us than we care about the things that are 'over there' from us.
If you look at all the technology we're interconnected with every day, all this complex technology that connects humanity, it actually doesn't connect us.
Music is a great catalyst for emotion because it gets to your core.
Web projects aren't done until I'm happy, or someone changes the password to the server. A formal release does not stop me from working on it more.
When you stand in a traditional audience, you have a wall of amplified sound coming at you from one direction. Everyone's familiar with that.
I love technology. I love trying to tell stories in new ways using technology.
My real motivation came from my quest for music videos to have the equally soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does. Honestly, I'm not sure they ever can.
