In a meagerly outfitted room in a Venice Beach home that once belonged to Dennis Hopper, a gnome is hiding from me.
He’s skittish, but I can sense him scurrying through the forest behind me. Every time I turn my head to find him, he’s gone. Even when I open the doors on the side of a tree to peek inside his little, sylvan home, he’s not there. When he finally appears again, we make eye contact. He wants the food that I’ve foraged. I crouch to the ground and extend my arm to hand him an acorn. He scurries away again.
I remove the headset — an HTC Vive — and it’s just a plain white room again. Outside, in the real world, a party’s happening. It’s a late August evening, and a DJ is playing under the twilight sky as guests snack on treats from Kogi in the backyard of the house, which now serves as the headquarters of virtual-reality content-creation company Wevr (formerly Wemo).
They’re celebrating the launch of their latest project, Gnomes & Goblins, an immersive fantasy created by Jon Favreau, director of The Jungle Book and the Iron Man franchise and, all those years ago, the writer and star of Swingers.
Despite all the style and swagger of the partygoers, the near-empty room is the real attraction. Pull down the Vive headset, clutch its controllers, and users are transported to a lush, whimsical forest. That’s where they’ll try to feed the gnome, whose apprehension changes with each experience. On this particular evening, it takes a few minutes to lure him with food.
After he finally grabs the gift, he reciprocates the kindness with a bell. Ring it, and the users become as small as he is. They can hang out inside the gnome’s treehouse. They can teeter at the edge of a rickety-looking bridge, wondering if it’s stable enough to hold their weight. There’s no harm in it — the worst consequence is bumping into a wall. Still, this world feels so real that the mind reacts with safety at the forefront, much as it would in an actual forest filled with its pursuant hazards. That’s what VR pros call “presence,” the result of a fully immersive experience like this.
“I want to create that experience, where you feel that level of comfort and that level of agency,” Favreau says, “but also that there are other things to explore and discover, almost like a Disneyland-type feel.”
Inside the headset, the hyper-realism transcends anything you’ll see at Disneyland. In virtual reality, users are Alice, growing and shrinking as they follow white rabbits into worlds that can thrill, confuse and sometimes even frighten, as only the most vivid dreams do.
In discussions about virtual reality, the pop cultural references are usually based in science fiction: Neuromancer, Snow Crash, The Matrix. But this is Lewis Carroll’s realm, a fusion of right- and left-brain functions that results in a bizarre defiance of logic.
“Scale is a very powerful tool in VR and, in the sense that you can be small and go places or be big and feel powerful, it affects the experience tremendously,” Favreau says. “I think Alice is a wonderful paradigm for the possibilities. Just like Alice could be very frenetic and off-putting, I think that there is a version of it that is a little more comfortable and feeds your curiosity more than creates spectacle and intensity.”
Once an overwhelmingly cumbersome and expensive technology, virtual reality spent the latter half of the 20th century trapped in the confines of military and academic research. For everyone else, it was little more than sci-fi. That almost changed in the 1990s, but a false start gave way to more than a decade of silence. Then, in 2012, a consumer-friendly headset called Oculus Rift hit Kickstarter and shook up the tech world, causing a tidal wave of innovation. Now that the hardware is available, all that’s missing is the piece of content that’ll get the public to buy in.
At this point, it seems that virtual reality really is the next big thing, and Los Angeles is positioning itself as the new industry’s creative hub. VR joins together Hollywood, the region’s substantial video-game world and its rising tech industry. It’s that convergence of big industries that will ultimately shape the worlds that users enter when they put on a headset.
For a famed director like Favreau, this is a rare chance to build a new kind of fiction. Virtual reality does away with the fourth wall; that changes how creators approach everything, from character development and narrative structure to art direction.
The new medium came at a perfect time for the film industry, in particular. Film L.A.’s “2015 Feature Film Study” indicated that, while California continues to be at the top of the cinematic-production heap, its dominance is trending downward in favor of cities and countries with more attractive incentives. That drop has been hard on the visual-effects industry.
Despite the rise of effects-driven blockbusters, business has slowed for the creatives who remain in L.A. In 2014, The Hollywood Reporter noted that more than 500 people protested just this fact outside of the Oscars, and Film L.A.’s report shows that work on 2015 films continued to move to countries like Canada and the U.K. But, VFX artists, adept at both creative and technological challenges, are suited for virtual reality. It appears that’s where they are heading.
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The buzz is big right now, but virtual-reality technology isn’t new. In fact, it began to take shape in the 1960s. Even the prospect of VR for the masses is a 20th-century ambition. It just took a little longer to get there.
VR’s roots are in an odd, immersive cinema invention called the Sensorama. The gizmo didn’t take off, but the idea of engulfing users in an unreal world took shape at universities and in the military for activities like flight simulation. By the 1990s, gaming companies had attempted to bring VR to the public. Sega had plans for a headset that never came to fruition. In 1995, Nintendo released the 3-D headset console Virtual Boy. It bombed.
“Really the hardware was the limitation,” says Jonnie Ross, co-founder of the virtual-reality convention VRLA and the annual industry honors, the Proto Awards. Technology wasn’t ready for home-friendly VR in the ’90s. That didn’t change until 2012, when Palmer Luckey introduced Oculus Rift, a headset that promised to bring virtual reality to home gamers. An early prototype of the device was made to accompany an installation at Sundance’s New Frontier that year.
By fall, Luckey had launched a Kickstarter for the VR headset, which he’d cobbled together in his parents’ Long Beach garage. The Oculus Rift was small enough to work at home and made with inexpensive technology. It wouldn’t come cheap, but you didn’t need a military budget to afford it, either.
Since then, Oculus has been bought by Facebook for $2 billion, and the device reached the marketplace earlier this year. So did the similarly immersive HTC Vive, the headset used at the Gnomes & Goblins launch. Budget-friendly products like Google Cardboard, as well as the mid-range Samsung Gear, are also available to consumers.
“This is the first year where there has been commercially available hardware, where you can walk into a store and buy a Vive or an Oculus Rift,” says Adam Levin, executive producer of the Proto Awards and co-founder of VRLA. “That’s a sea change for this industry that had been, previously, about either experiencing it at an event or some sort of installation or knowing someone who was in the VR business. Now, you can go to Best Buy.”
On a recent Saturday night at Avalon, a few hours before the usual weekend party crowd had descended upon Vine Street, an international group of virtual-reality professionals gathered for the third annual Proto Awards. Two years ago, the VR honors kicked off inside a ballroom at the Roosevelt Hotel — a nod to the first Academy Awards but with a crowd dressed mostly in jeans.
Since then, it has grown in size and formality; this year, some of the attendees were actually wearing suits. But that low-key tech vibe was still alive when the night’s first winner walked onstage in a hooded sweatshirt and gave a two-sentence acceptance speech. Ron Funches, the comedian who hosted the event, jokingly asked, “I could have just showed up in a hoodie?”
Back in 2014, when Ross suggested to his friend Cosmo Scharf that they should throw a VR awards show, it was a random idea, the kind that one throws out on long road trips (in this case, from L.A. to San Francisco). “Someone’s going to do it. We should do it because we would make it awesome,” he recalls having said.
Ross spent years directing commercials and music videos and was about to start work on funding his first feature film when he found out about Oculus Rift. He was immediately smitten with the prospect of accessible virtual-reality tools. In the ’90s, when he was a teenager in Baltimore, Ross wanted badly to step into VR. He called local arcades looking for one that might have a device. They laughed off his youthful curiosity before putting him back on hold.
Scharf, who was still a college student in 2014, had moved from New York to Los Angeles for USC’s film school, but the new VR tech had changed his ambitions. On the internet, he found others who shared his newfound interest, and they started a group called VRLA. They were from different backgrounds, different generations, even, but they shared a fascination with technology that has the potential to reimagine everything from entertainment and social media to educational films.
The first VRLA meetup took place on a motion-capture stage at VFX company Digital Domain, where one of the co-founders, John Root, was then employed. Matt Groening was among the attendees. (On a recent episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns stepped into virtual reality, and the show aired a VR couch gag in connection with Google Spotlight Stories on Oct. 16.) Less than six months after their first IRL meetup, the Proto Awards came to life.
A lot has changed in two years. Now, people in the VR world are clamoring for more tickets to the Protos. “People who are ‘old-timers’ in this new generation of VR have staffs that are composed of recent college graduates who say, ‘I’ve heard about this, can I go?’ ” Levin says.
Also, the content has changed. “The first year, we were awarding demos that were sketches of things,” he says. Levin mentions TiltBrush, the app that allows people to draw in virtual reality, which was awarded at the inaugural event. TiltBrush was later bought by Google and came back this year to win another Proto. Wevr’s theBlu also won for another year now that its three-episode season is available.
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Source: LA Weekly