Adi Robertson is a senior reporter for The Verge, and she was at Sundance covering the latest developments of VR storytelling. I caught up with her to unpack some of her New Frontier highlights including narrative innovations, how empathy pieces incite anger in her, surprise orgies & insect vision, VR auteurs Felix & Paul, as well as her her top 5 Sundance experiences.
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I also talk to Adi about the epic oral history of VR that she co-wrote after the Oculus acquisition by Facebook, as well as her experiences of using mobile VR in public.
Adi is VR gamer at heart, and talks about some of her favorite VR demos like Bullet Train as an example of feeling exhilarated with pure emotion, and hopes to see more interactive worlds on par with Job Simulator.
Adi sees storytelling in interactive games is still of an open problem, and believes that VR has the potential to be an interesting interactive media that allows us to make art that is impossible without it. But that this may limit our imaginations to reaching the full potential of creating Matrix-like worlds that could change the way that we see reality. She’s looking forward to exploring virtual worlds, immersing herself in SOMA-like VR worlds, and making all of our wildest sci-fi dreams about VR come true.
You can follow Adi’s stories on the Verge, and be sure to check out her beginner guide to the HTC Vive Pre:
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.040] Adi Robertson: So I'm Addie Robertson. I'm a senior reporter at The Verge, and I cover VR. I've been doing so probably for the past two and a half years. So tell me a bit about, like, when was the moment when you decided that this is something that needed to be covered? So, I was visiting a VR tourism sort of photosphere company, and I thought that the thing they were doing at that point was really, really bad. And I was trying to figure out why it was so bad, and I realized I had no idea, and I didn't really think anyone else did either. So I wanted to go and talk to developers about like how they made VR games basically. This was also when I discovered motion sickness. And so that was kind of the point at which I decided it was something I wanted to do sort of full-time. Yeah, and so maybe you could talk about like when you started to cover VR and reflect on a bit of some of the big things that you've seen happen. So the absolute first time I tried VR was probably CES 2013, which was like a huge moment. It was the first time any of us had, and it was that crazy taped together prototype, and we were all just absolutely beside ourselves. But after that, I mean, there was a long period where it felt like no one really knew what was going on, and I think that was the point at which I got really interested in the history of VR. which is probably the biggest thing I've ever done is a like long oral history of everything from the 1960s up through now. That's one of the things I'm proudest of. And after that, now I'm doing it really actually full time, almost. Yeah, I've come across that article. And I was really impressed with all the different people that you were talking to is a big, long sort of oral history. When you were going through that process, you know, what were some of the big milestones in the history of VR that you see? So we put it out right after Facebook bought Oculus, which was sort of the big modern milestone. But to me, there were things that had sort of been forgotten. Like Myron Kruger is probably the most famous VR person that no one has heard of. He was doing projected VR in the 70s and doing just this amazing art. back when no one else really paid attention to it. And we've kind of forgotten it. And then, of course, in the 60s, there was Ivan Sutherland, who created the thing that we now think of as being the first VR headset. And after that, probably the mid-90s, it's just this long, historically relevant period, during which Jaron Lanier was talking about how wonderful VR was going to be and how it was going to change everything, and you could play VR arcade games with virtuality. And there was a bunch of sort of popular hype around it. Yeah and I was actually kind of surprised when I talked to Tom Furness who was working in the Air Force in the early 60s around the same time as Ivan Sutherland and kind of the popular history is that Ivan Sutherland came up with it and you know he kind of did the back in 1963 the sketchpad which is sort of the first time that he was doing like computer graphics and then wrote the Ultimate Display in 1965 and Tom actually said that he was doing it right around the same time as Ivan Sutherland as well as like Morton Selig in the Censorama. He kind of pinned those three as kind of the origin points for virtual reality. Yeah, that's totally right. And that's actually what's weird is that whenever you talk about virtual reality, now people just mean headsets. But at that point, so Furness was doing something we'd probably call augmented reality now. Ivan Sutherland had something that was a bit more like a headset. Mort Helig was doing a thing where you like put your head into binoculars and fans blew on you. And it was all really different. And it was all just about sort of the sensation rather than the technology. Yeah, so as you've seen since the sort of the modern history of the Oculus Kickstart obviously was a huge thing, the prototype back in like 2012 at E3 when Carmack is taking this prototype to show off for the first time and then CES in 2013, which is when you got to see that same prototype. So from that, what do you see as kind of like the big milestones since, you know, Facebook bought Oculus? I think the big milestones have probably been companies besides Oculus doing things. I think that what's now PSVR, Project Morpheus being announced was really huge because it was the first time that a company was trying to approach VR like a real product, like a console, rather than a sort of hacker product. And then the HTC Vive has been this headset that was sort of rumored for years. as being just the absolute best VR you could possibly get. And now it's going on sale. So it's been sort of other people entering this field. And then obviously, knowing that Oculus is actually going to start selling things has been very important. Yeah, so we're here at Sundance 2016. And so, you know, there's the new Frontier section that last year, there was a lot of big press about having a lot of VR projects. This year they have about 30 VR projects that are there. So what are some of the things that you see that are really compelling and interesting to you? So I think my favorite thing that I've seen is Through the Eyes of an Animal, which is like very sort of weird old VR. that you put on a DK2 that's been covered in a giant black sphere, and the face of it has been replaced by moss. And it's trippy. Like, it's not really trying to be photorealistic in the way that I see a lot of VR. It's not really trying to be coherent. It's a video art project that just happens to be incredibly beautiful. Yeah, that was the one that you kind of imagine that you're seeing the eyes through the different insects. And so they have these point cloud representations of wind flowing around. Also a sub-pack, and so you're getting all this sort of visceral bass vibration in your body. And the only thing about that was that the headset turned out to be like, I don't know, 20 pounds or something like that, which I had to actually like just physically hold up in my head without it just like smashing my face in my glasses. Yeah, totally. I had to, that's the thing about VR is it makes me wonder whether I'm just really weak because my arms get tired. Like holding up cardboard, I can't do it for 20 minutes at a time. And I wonder if that's a thing that everyone feels or if I actually just haven't exercised enough. Yeah, that and, you know, there's also, you know, here at Sundance, I think, you know, some of the stuff that I'm really interested in is like the the type of things that I wouldn't be able to see at home later, because I have a lot of the headsets that they'll eventually come out. But there's some stuff that are like a mixed reality project. The Leviathan project, to me, is really interesting to see how they're mixing some augmented reality elements and to use all these physical props to be able to put into VR and creating this sense of additional presence while you're actually moving stuff around and getting to have a story that's also behind it all. Yeah, that's what's really fun about these exhibits. And what's probably going to be increasingly fun, because we're entering the first period where you're not sort of an avatar for the person reading your stuff, where you can actually tell someone to go see something. And that increasingly, it's going to be about either sort of preview things or about finding these weird experiments that haven't really broken through yet. Yeah, and there's also kind of three different sections here at Sundance. There's like the mobile VR, And there's all the gear VR experiences that you have. You have the tethered VR, which they have both Vive and Oculus experiences. And then they have kind of like these different art installations that they're all using the same technology, but are kind of have a different flavor than just a straight up VR demo. So for you, when you look at like the different mobile VR applications and experiences that you've seen so far, what are some of the ones that really stuck out for you? So it's a bit of a weird edge case because it's on the Oculus Rift, but also mobile, sequenced. It's an animated series that I think is going to premiere next year. And it's just interesting because I haven't seen people do much kind of cut out 2D in VR yet, that it has this neat puppet show feel to it. And then it just, it looks really different to just about anything here. Yeah, I think it reminded me of Colossus, which was in the mobile game jam. And I'd say it kind of like 2.5D because they're using 2D flat objects and having a whole world. And to me, it seems like that type of approach could be really interesting for kind of storytellers to jump in and start telling their stories without having to learn the full stack of development. And the thing that I was really thought that I was wanting more of was I kind of wanted to see them utilize it being in VR more than it was. It just felt like, okay, this could be on a screen. So yeah, I'm just curious from your perspective, what other type of parts of that experience you thought were really different or compelling? So I totally agree with you in that there was one moment that I thought was really cool, which is where one character is talking to another, and there's this sort of demon that shows up throughout the entire thing, and you don't really know who he is, but at some point he shows up behind one of the characters, and you have to kind of look around and see him. And that's the kind of this weird overlapping, like the puppet show thing, or paper dolls, that it's really a sense that you're getting 2D animation, but it is taking place in a 3D space. But I guess the main thing I want is I want more narrative. I want more people trying to like put work into the content rather than sort of having proofs of concept, which I feel like sequenced still is just a little bit. Yeah, there's a couple of experiences that I think that are really pushing that narrative edge, and that's the perspective by Rose Citrosh and Morris May, where they tell the story of police brutality through four different perspectives and four different films. So it's interesting because they're kind of like not just showing one perspective for the whole time, but they're actually intercutting the perspectives throughout each of the four segments so that you could watch one of them independently, but yet you won't get the full story unless you watch like the full 20 minutes worth of all the VR. Yeah, I really like, I mean, I find Perspective, the video of it just sort of hard to watch. It's really frustrating. And I wish they had more money. But yeah, I think the idea behind it is great. And I think the way that they intercut this particular version of Perspective is really good. Actually, I love Giant. Giant is sort of the perfect festival VR experience to me because they put a lot of work into creating something that seems beautiful and sets the mood when you go into it. You're in this empty room with stools. You feel totally separated from the rest of the Sundance New Frontier Gallery. And then it's a really interesting combination of rendered environments and a film. Yeah, they're blending a live action with a CGI. And, you know, the thing that's striking to me is that you're kind of just sitting in one spot. It could almost be like a theater performance, but yet they're adding a lot of sort of subwoofer bass as well as the bombs are dropping. And yeah, I thought that it was really well done and really moving. And, you know, in thinking about using VR as storytelling, you know, there's some filmmakers out there like Felix and Paul that I think they've taken this real, zen approach of like not having a lot of like voiceover or anything that's not even native to the environment. You're just kind of like, going to these different scenes and taking them in. And it's almost like, if you were to be this voyeur, that's just like this invisible person that's be able to just observe people and their natural behaviors, then you kind of get the sense of like, they're telling a story, but it's not like a direct narrative. Yeah, which is sort of what normal film is. I think that a lot of what VR has done is exposed the weirdnesses that we've gotten so used to in normal film that we don't notice them anymore. That you are absolutely a voyeur in film, and that there's a lot of film devoted to pretending that the camera's not there. That's what the entire found footage genre is, to some extent, is there's a camera but no one really cares that it's recording. So I'm not sure where that's going to go with VR because I think some of this has just been driven by necessity, that it's the thing that's simplest to do and not look weird and janky. Yeah, and I think some of the most sophisticated VR storytelling that I've seen here so far is 6x9 about, you know, solitary confinement. And it's kind of like a hybrid approach where they're doing like voiceover, they're doing kind of your inner room, they're doing like you hear the sounds of the prisoners in the background, but you're also kind of like seeing different things sketched on the walls. And so they're using the environment to really tell a story, which I haven't seen a lot of others. use because they're actually kind of like have this sort of interactive component and this ability to kind of look around the room and get different aspects of the story, but also kind of like give you the similar experience of actually being in solitary confinement. Six by Nine makes me so happy because I sort of went into it wondering if it was going to be one of those, it's going to make you literally feel like you're in solitary confinement and you will finally understand all of those news articles you read. But it's really not, it's just, it's a really great melding of being in an environment and having some context in that environment. Which is one of the things I feel like a lot of VR films lack, is the knowledge that context does matter, that you can't just drop someone in the middle of something and expect them to understand all of it. Yeah, and I think that, you know, to me, I've seen like these immersive journalism pieces like Six by Nine, Kia, by Nani de la Pena's emblematic group, as well as her Crossing the Line, where they're kind of like giving you this cinema verite type of experience, but also telling a story through that. And so, to me, it seems like this journalism in VR is like the cutting edge of narrative in VR, at least at this point. Yeah, and I kind of wonder how much of that is the business model, because branded content is a thing that we understand how to do in journalism. And so extending that to VR almost makes sense, where there's not actually a lot of space for some of the things that we want to do in VR otherwise. One thing I'm really surprised there's not more of is VR music videos. It's the only other thing I can think of that fits as well. And I barely see any of it. Well Surge is here and Surge has been out for a while and Surge I think is probably to me one of the most like compelling you know music videos because it's got this like low poly surrealist aesthetic but it's just like got these anthropomorphized like dancing cubes and it just like you have some interactivity as you're looking around as well and so Reggie Watts has a video as well for Weaver and he's got some music in there that's really quite trippy and There's some other, like the Wonderland with this sort of floating Cheshire cat, like the psychedelic mushroom that's got some music. But as you've sort of been watching a lot of the experiences here, have there been any other ones that kind of stand out? Giant stood out, Across the Line, and Kia stood out. Actually, I kind of like the Unknown Photographer. It reminded me of VR back in 2013, where everyone just fired up Unity and made a bunch of cubes and blocks and told something really complicated around it. That the idea is that it's this incredibly long sort of monologue about World War I, but it's in something that you could basically make in 10 minutes in Unity. And what did you think about the Kia in Crossing the Line? It's a little bit weird because people talk about VR empathy a lot as being able to sort of try to put yourself in another person's shoes. But those are sort of examples where a lot of people don't have to. If you're female, you've spent a lot of time hearing about this or thinking about what would happen if it happened to you, because it's very likely. And so I don't know it. I feel like VR empathy is touted as being a sort of unalloyed good, but it made me really angry. It made me want to murder people. And I'm apparently not the only person who felt that. And it feels like a weird sort of inversion of what we think VR empathy is supposed to be. Yeah, because in Crossing the Line, you're kind of faced with these protesters yelling these really ugly, horrible things to women as they're walking into a Planned Parenthood to either get an abortion or either just to see a health clinic. And so it to me, it's like less about the empathy for these people who are screaming at you and more about like, what's it like to have to be in that position where you're getting yelled at when you're just trying to have the freedom of choice. But that's the thing is that I don't feel empathy for the person doing that because I already feel like that could be me. And so it's that, I don't know, the thing that feels like empathy to that person for me is just hatred for all of the people who are doing this to them. Wow. And so what have been some experiences where you've really felt like they really carried through this empathy? I'm probably a lot more skeptical of the idea of the value of empathy than a lot of people because, I don't know, I think the thing that's valuable about empathy is like the empathy that you find in art, that it's not about, it's supposed to make you feel like you want to go donate to a cause, it's supposed to just make you feel like someone has illuminated something. I think that versus stuff can be good at this, but I think that it would be stronger if they did try to tell a story instead of try to tell a being another person. What are some experiences in VR that you've seen that you kind of see are like your top experiences that you point to, like people should try to use this as an example to kind of create more of something like that? So the problem is that I like a lot of VR gaming and I think that bullet train is actually, it sounds terrible to say a Sundance, but it's one of the best things just because it's so competent because it creates this incredible feeling of exhilaration and of pure motion. that's something that I don't feel a lot of in VR. Of the things that are here, I think that interactive things are cool. I wish people were doing sort of more things like Job Simulator, where you're interacting with the world, and the world can be really interesting, but you have this sense of ownership of it. Yeah, and I think that in terms of presence, you know, having some sort of agency within the environment is a key thing. And like, yeah, you're right that the only couple that are here that really exhibit that true agency are probably the Job Simulator Leviathan project and probably the Martian where you're kind of flying around a spaceship but adding interactivity and feeling like you can actually change the story that's like this challenge of trying to have like something that goes beyond just local agency where you're able to kind of change small things but maybe the narrative is going to be fixed already so having like a Both like local and global agency I think is going to be sort of the cutting edge of like the narrative storytelling in the future and I did an interview with Andrew Stern of facade They're doing a lot of thinking about how to take like input from the user and have like, you know, maybe five different endings that there's different choice points where you don't know whether or not one of the things that you're choosing is going to make a big difference or something that's just going to flavor the experience later on. And so to me, that's where I think like the potential of narrative storytelling is going. And then these types of experiences like bullet train, if they're able to actually add a story to it, I agree will be a little bit more compelling than, you know, sort of this more passive VR that we've been seeing so far. Yeah, well, the thing's hard is that we've been talking about this in games, like 3D games for so long, and we still haven't figured it out. Like, you will still find people like Warren Spector saying, we don't know anything about storytelling in video games. And video games are a lot more like VR than most things, just because they're kind of the only medium that we've tried to make interactive, and tried to make worlds that people literally inhabit in. Cool, and there's been some other pieces that you've done for The Verge that I think are interesting, like you put on a VR headset and you're putting yourself in public, and when you think about some of the other stuff that you've covered in VR, what are some other things that you thought were really interesting or really proud of? I was really proud of that. I felt like trying to live in the future, which is one of the things that's fun about VR. I've also enjoyed just getting to go around to universities and see the sort of stuff that's cutting edge but doesn't look cutting edge, like going to USC. and seeing their mixed reality lab and their wide five headset and all of these things that they're trying to push forward with stuff like presence and with tying it to things like drones and being able to walk forever in VR, things like that, or at Virginia Tech's Cube. Being able to just bring these things to people because they're never going to go on sale has been really incredible. So what type of experiences do you want to have in VR then? I mean, I want to have the kinds of experiences I enjoy in games. I want to have something where it feels like I'm exploring a place, and I'm exploring it not because it's in VR and, oh, it looks real, because I don't really want to explore, like, this condo that I'm in, but because it's a really compelling, interesting environment. Like, I want VR soma, or VR sort of frictional games, because they're games, you're doing things in them, but they're also just absolutely amazing, and you can spend hours in them. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what that might be able to enable? I guess there's the ultimate potential of virtual reality as it exists, which is that it could become a really interesting medium in the way that games are an interesting medium, that it lets us do things that we don't know how to do in art right now. And then there's the potential of matrix VR. Which is that we could literally design any world that we wanted and change The way that we see reality and I think that the first thing is kind of keeping us from the second thing because it makes us limit our imaginations and I'm hoping that that changes but I think that that's just this amazing science fiction dream that everyone has Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you
[00:21:02.448] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening! If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
