The music industry’s main interaction with Cannes is for the Midem conference in June, and for some companies, the Cannes Lions advertising festival that follows it.
April, however, sees the television industry come to town for MIPTV. It’s part market for buying and selling new shows, and part conference to talk about the business and technology trends driving TV forward.
Just like Midem, there’s often one topic at MIPTV that generates lots of heat. This year, it was virtual reality. Music Ally was there for many of the key VR sessions: here are some of the main things we learned, and what we think they mean for our readers in the music industry.
There are probably only 20m headsets out there
Don’t believe (all) the hype: the current wave of VR headsets aren’t yet mass-market products by any stretch of the imagination.
The number quoted by a number of MIPTV speakers was 20m headsets out in the market, with 10m of them being Google Cardboard and 5m Samsung’s Gear VR – both examples of ‘mobile VR’ devices that use smartphones as their processing guts and screens.
On the non-mobile ‘tethered’ side – headsets that require a games console or computer – there are barely more than 1.5m on the heads of consumers: 915k PlayStation VRs (an official number from Sony); 420k HTC Vives and 300k Oculus Rifts (external estimates).
Analysts do expect this to grow though: figures from Greenlight Insights quoted during MIPTV predicted 181.1m VR headsets by 2021, by which point the VR market will be worth $59.1bn annually.
The lesson for music: These are still early days for the current generation of VR. With the tethered headsets also skewing much more towards games, musical VR experiences may be best suited to Samsung and Google’s mobile VR devices.
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VR technology alone won’t wow people
The first time you put a VR headset on and try a game or app, it’s quite exciting. But as several MIPTV speakers warned, that novelty factor soon wears off: and all the more quicker if that first experience isn’t very good.
“We’re in the post-wow era, where storytelling has to come to the fore and audiences will become more demanding,” said Ben Smith of VR firm Laduma, during the conference.
Google’s head of Daydream business development Greg Ivanov also warned of a ‘Cardboard curiosity’ barrier: where people are curious enough to try VR, but then lose interest if their first experience disappoints.
“There’s plenty of bad VR out there, and consumers are thrown by seeing bad experiences,” added Brian Seth Hurst, from VR producer StoryTech Immersive. Ivanov was clear that developers have to put proper thought into their VR projects’ unique nature.
“Good VR is an experience that’s well thought out in terms of why it is actually in VR. Good VR has a proposition that is unique to VR. It sounds really obvious, but it’s key,” he said.
“It has to be better in VR, or only in VR… A lot of media companies have a tendency to take what they have and put it in VR. That might be a good bridge, but it’s not the ultimate destination for VR.”
The lesson for music: ‘Better in VR or only in VR’ is a good motto to adopt when planning musical VR projects. From studio interviews to concert videos, how many current examples really meet Ivanov’s suggestion?
Video good, but game engines better?
There are basically two current types of VR content: 360 videos filmed with cameras; and computer-generated virtual worlds created using game engines. A lot of musical VR projects fall into the former camp, but perhaps the greater potential will come from the latter.
“My personal mission this year is really to try to work with interactivity as much as possible. The game engine is 100% the future of this industry,” said Richard Nockles, the creative director of British broadcaster Sky’s VR studio.
“I’m fascinated with how this is going to work: the controllers, interactive, branching narratives… 360 video is unbelievably heavy [to stream]. I would love to watch a 90-minute feature film, and the only way you could do that now is through game engines and animation.”
Simon Benson, from Sony’s PlayStation VR team, agreed, and sketched out how it might work for TV production.
“Maybe when we’re making a new piece of content… a drama as an example, you capture the performances of all your actors. Maybe that’s motion-captured, and their likenesses are recreated, and you’re putting all that into one of these game engines,” he said.
“Once it all exists digitally as a complete piece, you can choose where to put the cameras later. You can choose where you want the lighting later. You can do all that, fundamentally, in the post-production process.”
The lesson for music: Video is just as natural a gateway into VR for music as it is for television, but why not also explore partnerships with developers and startups who know their way around game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine, and think about true interactivity rather than just a shifting gaze?
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Children may be early adopters of VR
Will children be keen on VR? And if they are, will their parents let them use these headsets, given the lack of detailed research about VR’s effects on younger minds. Even so, there are indications that the technology could catch on with kids.
Peter Robinson of research firm Dubit claimed at MIPTV that his company’s most recent survey found that 20% of American under-16s have tried VR, for example, while the percentage for British children is 18%. “It’s pretty much doubled over the past 12 months,” he said.
Former BBC executive Marc Goodchild, who currently works as head of digital content strategy and product at Cartoon Network’s parent company Turner, talked about the creative possibilities.
“It allows you for the first time to put children into their favourite programmes with their favourite characters. Or even to become their favourite characters,” he said, during a panel session where creative VR apps like Tilt Brush were praised for their appeal to children, even though they’re all-ages in focus.
Goodchild also said that children will demand interactivity from virtual reality. “In a kids world, actually most media is interactive. They’re used to having agency in whatever they do. It’s only the television which is the last bastion of passive viewing,” he said.
“So although a lot of the VR conversations you’ll hear here are either cinematographic, or it’s a gaming experience, the kids space is a lot more blurred. Kids will expect when they’re in that world to have some agency. The first thing they’ll look for is the hands… It’s going to be hard to expect children to watch something sitting back almost tied to their chair, and only able to look around.”
The lesson for music: There’s clearly potential for some fun (mobile) VR experiences around pop artists with young audiences. But as with Cartoon Network’s impressiveAdventure Time: I See Ooo VR app, interactivity will be important rather than just linear 360 video.
Break the rules!
Finally, a rousing call to arms for anyone creating VR content: don’t be too quick to bow to anyone telling you what you can and can’t do in this evolving medium.
“There are no rules in VR, so if someone tells you ‘here are the rules and the way you should do it’ you should break those rules straight away!” said Brian Seth Hurst at MIPTV
“I don’t believe in rules: it’s using your head, it’s using your gut… You just have to understand the technology and environment you’re in to make it work… Forget what you learned in film school, forget everything you know about film for just one moment, because you are dealing in a new medium that’s a ton of fun.”
The lesson for music: No surprises here: break the rules! Experiment, explore and don’t be too fast to fall in behind conventions.
Source: Musically