AMD’s Roy Taylor discusses what’s going to be big for VT in 2017 – location-based VR, more complex content, and experiences good enough you’ll be willing to pay for them.
Roy Taylor is ‘the VR guy’ at AMD. His official title is corporation vice president – content and technologies, but what this really involves is working with the entertainment industries to help them produce better and more engaging VR experiences. Better VR means more people and companies buying VR kit, which require much more powerful graphics chips than your average PC – so if it takes off and AMD’s marketed itself well, the company will sell more graphics cards (and chips inside laptops and the PS4, which has its own VR helmet in the PS VR).
Hollywood-based, and working with the film and game industries (and the ‘digital entertainment’ space that sits somewhere in-between), Roy has an overview of where the industry is headed. Ao on a recent trip to London, I caught up with him to hear his views on the challenges and opportunities for VR in 2017. Of course, working for AMD, his insights are coloured by AMD’s heavy presence in high-end VR but not in mobile (ie, phone-powered) VR. But in ‘desktop VR, AMD is almost platform-agnostic – its chips powering PCs that support both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and inside the PS4.
Before looking to the year ahead, I asked Roy’s perspective on where we are now – for which he has a clearly well-prepared answer.
“We’re at the roughly equivalent to about where the film industry was in 1905,” says Roy. “In 1905, the Kinetoscope had been out since 1891, so the first pieces of content were just starting to be made, but it was with the introduction of theNickelodeon [early cinemas] in 500 locations across America when it took off.
“We’re kind of in the same place now. We know that [VR] offers immense promise, particularly in film. – and to a lesser degree in games. But we haven’t yet got the killer piece of content that makes us all rush home early, and give up our Christmases, neglect the kids, because it’s so awesome.
“This is going to come along – VR going to ‘happen’.’
Roy says that the biggest issue that the industry has right now is the relatively low number of users/potential customers for content creators. He quotes Jon Peddie Research’s stats that 750,000 VR headsets will ship before the end of this year – with 2.7 million more shipping next year.
“So in the next year, it will be still an installed base of around four million,” he says. “Even if he’s wrong by a 100 percent, it’s still [only] eight million.
“A key issue we have is that modern content today costs around a million dollars a minute to make. Interestingly, it’s the same for whether it’s [a game like] Battlefield 1or [a movie such as] Ghostbusters. You’ve got to find a business model which will support those levels of investment. If you only have an installed base of four or eight million that’s not big enough for you to go and get revenue of say $400-600 million.
“Roughly speaking, both games and movies are looking at a 4-to-1 ratio, so you spend a 100 million to make it you want to make 400 million. That’s how you cover other costs. We need a bigger installed base.”
Location-based VR
The best way to get more people to use VR, says Roy, is what the industry calls ‘location-based VR’. This is a catchall term for high-end VR experiences that take place outside your home using VR kit provided by the theme park, museum, shopping centre, cinema, film festival or games arcade that they’re located in. Notable examples we’ve covered include the Game of Thrones exhibition experience, the BBC’s Spacewalk (below, which debuted at DocFest in Sheffield), and the VR rollercoaster ride at Six Flags in the US.
These not only make money for the content creators – assuming that audiences are willing to pay extra to experience them, as they used to for ‘4D’ rides and arcade games – but if they’re done well, they encourage people to buy the hardware to have their own VR experiences at home. And if enough of them do, that’s when VR becomes ‘a thing’ rather than a niche pastime.
Hardware alone can’t achieve mainstream success for VR – compelling experiences is what really makes the difference between VR being a fad like, arguably, 3D and a must-have-that-becomes-the-norm like HD. Loving what you play/experience builds the word-of-mouth that spreads the medium virally, like playing WipeOut on the PlayStation round a friend’s house in the early 90s made us all want to go buy PlayStations.
While we’ve seen a lot of VR content from companies with backgrounds in games, post-production, VFX and film – it’s the latter that Roy thinks likely will produce the best VR experiences in the immediate future. It’s not that the others can’t – he cites Bethesda’s VR version of Fallout 4 (below) as one of the best VR experiences around – it’s just that filmmakers have the most experience at telling the compelling stories that will really engage people.
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Roy also mentions The Martian as an example of a notable film-related VR project. However, he notes, it wasn’t a complete success with audiences.
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Source: Digital Arts On Line