Sony’s The London Heist is one of the best fusions of narrative VR storytelling with interactive game components. It’s structured as a flashback sequence starting with you being confronted within an interrogation room, and there are branching narratives that flavor the timing of the plot points and can be triggered by whether or not you’re paying attention to the main character. The flashback action sequences serve to transport you into having an embodied presence, and it’s the closest experience I’ve felt that was suddenly living within an action film, car chase.
I had a chance to talk to George Andreas, the Creative Director of Sony’s PlayStation VR Worlds, at GDC 2016 where we talked about the narrative experiments, lessons learned, as well as the four other bespoke experiences ranging from an underwater experience, a space adventure, street luge racing game, and the futuristic competitive sporting game of Danger Ball. All of these experiences will be exclusively shipping with the PlayStation VR, and so I take the opportunity to make some comments and reflections about the ongoing debate about the exclusive vs. cross-platform & closed vs. open content ecosystems.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Here’s the Announcement Trailer for PlayStation VR Worlds that premiered at GDC 2016:
For more context about exclusive content trends on streaming video, then be sure to check out Mark Suster’s Snapstorm presentation on Online Video part 2.
For more context about how open standards usually thrive off of proprietary competition, then be sure to listen to my 2015 interview with Khronos Group’s Neil Trevett.
Every open standard has a proprietary competitor, and competition is healthy according to the Khronos Group pic.twitter.com/H5zq4XRJyv
— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) March 4, 2015
And the other interview that I mentioned is with ESA’s Mike Gallagher on how video games are protected by the First Amendment.
Bruce Wright kickstarted a lively debate about VR and PTSD with this provocative Tweet:
https://twitter.com/heybrucewright/status/660858809020104704
For highlights of this long thread, then check out Dora Cheng’s Storyify on VR and PTSD.
Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. On today's episode, I have George Andreas, who is the Creative Director of Sony PlayStation's VR Worlds Experience, which is a collection of five different bespoke experiences that is going to be launching with every PlayStation VR. So we'll be talking about some of those different experiences, but really focusing in on the London Heist, because this experience is really combining storytelling and interactive game components in one of the most innovative ways that I've seen so far. There's seven different vignettes, and it's kind of structured as a flashback experience. So it sort of starts at the end, and then you have flashbacks of different action sequences that are leading you to the different narrative components. So we'll be talking about this fusion of immersive storytelling with interactive game components on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by Unity. Unity has created a tool set that has essentially democratized game development and created this lingua franca of immersive technologies, allowing you to write it once in Unity and be able to deploy it to any of the virtual or augmented reality platforms. Over 90% of the virtual reality applications use Unity. So to learn more information, check out Unity at Unity3D.com. So this interview with George Andreas happened at the exclusive press event for the PlayStation VR at GDC on March 15th, 2016. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:48.813] George Andreas: My name is George Andreas. I'm the Creative Director on PlayStation VR Worlds. We are producing a range of different end-to-end PSVR experiences, completely bespoke, built from the ground up, that really showcase, I guess, the magic and the power of the PlayStation VR platform. We have everything from descending hundreds of feet under the water and seeing all the beautiful fish around you and seeing lovely little turtles, to then come in face-to-face with a great white shark, which is a very, very powerful moment in VR. It's a very, very dramatic moment. We have the London Heist, which is another experience that we built specifically for PlayStation VR from the ground up, and that uses two moves. We're able to interact with the objects, interact with characters in the game world. What we've shown of the London Heist so far is just a smaller subset of a larger experience, and that will be part of the launch of PlayStation VR Worlds. We have other experiences such as Scavenger's Odyssey, which is a space kind of adventure experience, lots of shooting, you're in this, you're an alien character so we tried to do something that's very very different. You plug into this fantastic scavenger craft that's able to move and crawl and jump and twist in the air and kind of take on the enemies and crawl up the side of space hulks and a very kind of epic kind of space adventure. And then we have the kind of the more competitive, instantly more replayable experiences, things like Dangerball, which is a futuristic sport that people basically competing, and if they don't win they die. So it's a very kind of, it's about reactions, tests of skill, and there's lots of nuance to the gameplay, infinitely replayable because of the way the game actually is structured and works. And we also have things like Street Lose, which is, I think you may have seen some stuff on that in the past, so that's kind of a lying down experience. In the final product, you won't have to lie down to play. You will be able to play from a seated position, but you're only a few feet off the ground, hurtling under lorries, kind of weaving in and out of traffic, so it's a lovely selection of different types of experiences, something for VR novices as well as those more kind of hardened gamers as well, so a great selection of bespoke experiences.
[00:03:45.457] Kent Bye: I think the London heist is really interesting to me because you're doing a lot of really innovative stuff in terms of interactive storytelling. So maybe tell me a bit about what you were trying to do there.
[00:03:54.162] George Andreas: Well, I guess the original conceit was always to try and develop a dramatic thriller and could we do that with VR being the centre, I guess, the eyes of the world and putting the player inside a gritty underground London gangster thriller and giving them hands in that experience as well, so independent moves, left hand and right hand. And the idea was always to try and provide some action that was very compelling, being able to reload guns, open drawers, very intuitive, very approachable, anyone can do that. But we also wanted to create a sense of drama as well, so having some kind of character interaction and being face to face with a thug who's literally just a few feet away from you at the beginning of the experience, it's a very kind of intense moment and something you don't expect. You don't know who you are, you don't know why you're there, you're not sure what's happened and what's got you to this point, but you know something is up and something is about to kind of reveal itself to you. and the conceit was always to flashback through a series of dramatic flashbacks and then play back up to the moment where you were at the hands of the ganglord at the very end. Storytelling is an interesting subject. There's a lot of developers right now trying to figure out VR storytelling and there's a lot of nuance to it. It's still an untapped area. There's a lot more that we can still learn and we're learning all the time with our VR experiences as well. allow someone to step into the role of another character and be completely immersed in that story and narrative is a fine goal to aim for.
[00:05:19.559] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think one of the things that people have been finding with narrative and VR is that the NPCs have to have a certain amount of social behaviors or be reactive to what you're doing and if they're not then it can sort of break presence and not seem like it's real or plausible. So I'm curious about some of the different things that you did in The London Heist in order to increase that plausibility with your NPCs.
[00:05:39.785] George Andreas: Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's an interesting aspect, really. I think the thing with VR, what we're finding is if you can match the player's expectations, and that's for everything. It's whether you're interacting physically with something or whether you're trying to converse or interact in some way with another NPC, with another character. So if a character asks you to take something out of his hand, for instance in the heist, Mickey asks you to pick up the phone, get up, pick up the phone, and if you don't do it, your natural reaction is, actually the first time you see this is to not obey him. And then we have to build in a lot of systems to allow the player to play how they want to play, but the game can still run itself through the narrative, and so there'll be alternative dialogue trees that the character can actually look into and basically talk to, but it's that expected reaction. And if you expect him to do something, then if we meet that expectation, then it's usually very, very powerful.
[00:06:31.703] Kent Bye: Are you doing any branching of the story? I mean, I guess there's some decisions that you can make and it may kind of flavor the story in different ways, but I'm also curious if those decisions will drastically change the outcome of the story.
[00:06:43.218] George Andreas: Yeah, I mean, we're doing a little bit of, I think it's very slight kind of bending of the narrative slightly as you play through the final version of the London heist. We can do, you know, for that experience, an end-to-end experience, like I said, we've only seen three scenes. There are seven scenes in total in the final experience. There's only so much you can do within that time. But I do expect there to be a lot more, you know, a lot more experimentation in that field and that area. I think we can do an awful lot with that. But the heist is kind of a self-contained end-to-end experience. There's a lot of new things that we're trying out in that experience, from the interactions to the character interactions, the expected outcomes. So we're trying to keep that focused and we'll see how things evolve after we launch PlayStation VR Worlds.
[00:07:24.397] Kent Bye: What are some of your favorite stories of people going through the VR Worlds experiences?
[00:07:29.418] George Andreas: It changes all the time, I mean, even today as an example, there's a chap who's just basically been on the system, hasn't been on anything before, has first experience in PlayStation VR, and just seeing the reaction that we get, and you know, it's a very natural reaction, it's a very honest reaction. And we almost get desensitized to that when we're at the studio and we're working on the games, you know, to us it's second nature, we play the experiences all the time. But just to see that kind of first initial reaction that people have, that doesn't disappear. That's the same for everyone, whether they're a hardened gamer or somebody who just wants to put on the headset and just have a bit of fun. So for me the first time is always the best time to see people's reactions and then obviously for those people that have gotten used to VR, for me the trick is then how do we re-engage those people and really excite them again. So it's that kind of being first with something and seeing the reaction of people's kind of response to that first.
[00:08:24.698] Kent Bye: With VR, it's an immersive medium. In film, there's a lot of different strategies to be able to plan and storyboard and write out an experience. But in VR, it's sort of like a dynamic, interactive 3D environment that is kind of hard to visualize in 2D. So I'm curious, after you've started to create some of these experiences, what your production pipeline looks like in terms of planning and then executing an experience.
[00:08:47.668] George Andreas: Yeah, I mean, you know, taking the London heist as an example, we storyboarded the entire experience and we have with most of our experiences to be fair. And storyboarding for me is a great tool because it allows us to get things on paper very quickly and we can see, I guess, the transformation of the experience on paper. It is two-dimensional. But it's very easy to see where there are obvious holes and obvious areas that need to be explored very quickly and areas that we know we absolutely don't need to try and work too hard on because we know those areas are already covered or we know how to deal with those areas. And from the storyboard you then literally just start to implement some basic prototypes. So it's the same with anything really. You just put some prototypes together and start to help inform the bigger picture. But, you know, some teams like working with storyboards, some teams don't like working with storyboards. There's a different approach depending on the teams that you work with, but for us, we like to storyboard as much as we possibly can, because that kind of gives us a lot of things very quickly, very cheaply, and it doesn't cost a lot to draw some sketches, and then we can kind of just build on that.
[00:09:47.498] Kent Bye: So what's next for the Sony London studio, then?
[00:09:50.157] George Andreas: Well, what's next is to finish up with GDC this week and to get back to the studio and to try and finish for the launch of PlayStation VR. You know, we have kind of put a big marker out there. We are building five very bespoke experiences, which is... I don't think it's been done before by any developer, to be honest, in terms of the types of experiences that we're trying. So, it has been an interesting challenge to try and get everybody up to that level. And then we'd just like to see how things resonate, what things resonate, and then we can kind of plan ahead for the next step for London Studio. Definitely something to do with VR, I think is, you know, I could be confident and say that. And maybe some other experiences as well that might not focus on VR.
[00:10:32.199] Kent Bye: And so what do you want to experience in VR then?
[00:10:34.541] George Andreas: I'm experiencing it in PlayStation VR worlds at the moment, to be honest. All the things that we've built, they resonate with me and they resonate with the team. Everything from a space adventure, an underwater experience, being able to race in experiences, the London Heist, stepping into the shoes of an East End gangster. That kind of combination of narrative and action, I think, is potent and very, very powerful. And I think we've got something that's very, I guess, well-received so far. So it'd be nice to see how things can evolve with that possibly in the future.
[00:11:06.263] Kent Bye: I've heard some people talk about, you know, the more interactive an experience is, the less you can get sort of really immersed into the story. There's a bit of a trade-off between, you know, doing a game versus kind of receiving a narrative and a story, and I'm curious if you've found that tension in some of the experiences that you've created.
[00:11:22.347] George Andreas: I think we try to strike a nice balance between giving the player some things to do. If it's a piece of drama or a piece of narrative that's been delivered to the user, to the player, if you give them too many distractions then that suddenly takes their focus away from what's actually being told and what's being said to them. The thing with VR is you can't control where people look and we know that. You're the cameraman really in that experience. We've had to learn a lot of tricks in terms of how we guide the players through our experiences and get them to see the things we want them to see without physically grabbing their head and turning them towards the things that we want to see.
[00:11:56.435] Kent Bye: But yeah, yeah. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:12:04.954] George Andreas: I think it's everything. For me it's the first time that multiple different entertainment mediums are converging, I think. We do have the movie industry, the music industry, cinema, we have games, a variety of educational applications as well. And for me it's just seeing almost the unity of all these different things beginning to blur together now. You know, the London Heist I think is a great example of almost the movie and game aspects being merged together in terms of those two forms of entertainment. I think we can do more with that. And I just see this as another medium that people will look into. I think the opportunities are out there, the types of things that we can build, we don't even know what the outskirts of that looks like at this stage or the boundaries of that is. I think VR for me as well is one of those systems that the learning over the last two years is possibly the fastest learning of any form of input I've seen in the industry for the last 20-25 years. So where we were two years ago with the demos and the experiences that were built then, and you look two years later now and we're on a show floor with many, many different games of different experiences, and this is only after a two-year stint, and there are more coming. So I think the learning in the industry has been incredibly fast. I've not seen it accelerate this fast before, so we'll see where that takes us in the next two years.
[00:13:28.660] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's a really interesting way of saying it, like a fusion of different communication mediums. I think that's really true, especially with, you know, film and gaming with the London Heist. And I'm curious if you have any sort of reflections of what the strengths or weaknesses of VR are in terms of this new communication medium.
[00:13:45.268] George Andreas: Strengths and weaknesses. I guess, you know, things can be very intimate. I think the weaknesses, you know, the weaknesses at this stage I think we're still learning and still trying to figure out what's the best way to utilize the tech and there's a lot of pros. There are some negatives in terms of initially we thought that putting on a VR headset would be a very isolated experience. For example, But we have discovered that people like to see what's going on on the screen and suddenly it becomes a social experience. So here we've taken something that might be a predominantly single player's experience and then suddenly the room is engaged by it and enthralled by what's going on on the screen. So, you know, what could be perceived as a weakness has actually turned out to be a bit of a strength. So that's been good.
[00:14:30.487] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much. You're welcome. So that was George Andreas. He's the creative director of the Sony PlayStation VR Worlds, and he was talking about the five different bespoke experiences that Sony has been developing to be able to launch with the PlayStation VR in October. So, there's a number of different takeaways that I got from this interview. First of all, the London Heist is probably one of the most sophisticated VR storytelling experiences that I've seen. There was a lot of really interesting interactive narrative components that were happening within this London Heist experience because You're kind of in a scene and you don't really have much control with your hands, you're kind of bound up and you can only just look different places and lean around. But they had just that simple mechanic of head rotation and where you were looking to be able to trigger different dialogue trees that were happening in the very first experience. It's a little difficult to know where those trees are happening, you know. One thing that Chet Falsnak said is that, you know, the bane of existence of interactive narratives is that sometimes as someone who's going through the experience, they have no idea whether or not what they're doing is triggering different branches within the narrative. But one thing that George said was that it's a slight bending of the story, which I kind of think of the difference between the local agency versus global agency. You're not really having any true global agency in the outcome of this story of the London Heist. It's pretty much on rails, and you're able to kind of flavor it in different ways by having these different branches. And if you're not paying attention, then there's different subtle ways that they have for having the character to do an action within the scene to get you to try to pay attention to him again. My own experience of the London heist was a pretty interesting reaction to it, actually. I first got a chance to try it back in Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in 2015. It premiered at GDC in 2015, but I didn't have a press pass at that point, so I wasn't able to see the press-exclusive preview of that. I did get a chance to see it at SVVR and I kind of had a pretty visceral reaction to some of the first-person shooters. I think that was probably one of the first times that I had killed somebody in VR with motion tracked controllers. And I had a pretty visceral reaction to it because it was pretty bloody and I've experienced a couple of suicides in my life, one of which was with a gun. It was pretty sobering. It kind of took me back to that moment. And it was surprising because I had seen lots of violence since this happened in 2007, but I had never been kind of immersed into a situation. And so it really started to tell me that there's actually something really different that happens when you're experiencing violence in VR and you're immersed into the scene rather than just kind of watching it on a 2D screen. I think there's something that's fundamentally different, even from my own personal experience of having kind of like this re-triggering of PTSD. So it's something that I've actually talked to a number of different people about. Probably the most memorable one was at the VRX conference. This is after I had played the third out of seven experiences. And this one was a little bit more subdued. I'm in a car and racing around. And by that time, I was a little bit more desensitized to it. But still, this question of violence in VR was still at the top of my mind. And were the ratings of these VR games that have violence and blood in them going to be rated higher? And what are the implications of violence in VR for all these millions of people that are going to be playing this specific experience with the London Heist? It's going to be launching with the PlayStation VR. And so It's got a little bit different considerations. I predict that once this does launch, I think there's going to be quite a lot of mainstream media news coverage about this type of violence in VR. We haven't seen it a lot because it's still kind of like in the PC gaming realm and kind of sequestered off into the aspects of VR that are not quite as mainstream. But the PlayStation will have like 40 million different units. And when they launch, depending on whether or not they're able to actually ship as many as the demand is, they could ship up to 1 to 4 million worth of headsets within the next year from the launch. So it's going to be hitting the mainstream in a new way. So just the point that I wanted to make about Mike Gallagher is that what he said is that the ESA took this court case from California to the Supreme Court You know, there's different video game ratings in California. I think at some point decided to say, Hey, we're going to have our own ratings. And the video game industry as a whole has this consortium and they wanted to take it to courts to prevent, you know, having this fractured, you know, rating systems to have different rating systems in different States, which would be a bit of a nightmare to manage. So they just want to have one rating system and. And they made the argument that, you know, this is a First Amendment right to be able to have whatever kind of violent experiences that we want. It's our constitutionally protected free speech. And so they actually won that case. And so it's great that video games are protected by the First Amendment. So we can pretty much create whatever we want. However, there's more of an ethical considerations here in terms of what type of experiences do we want to have. there was somebody from the PlayStation VR who had had Tom Furness try the London Heist experience and they were really excited to see what his reaction was and you know what he said was, really? Really? This is what we're going to do with VR? And he just kind of shook his head and walked away and I think that there's something to be said for that but there's also I think people are going to want to do this I can see totally both sides of this, where we want to be able to have the virtual world society and create all the biggest potential for VR. But this goes back to this interview I did with Nathan Birbo of Servios, when Ben could share with this article about, hey, in VR, do we really want to just shoot zombies in the face? And I asked him, Point Blake, well, what about your experience? You have this experience where you're shooting zombies in the face. What do you have to say for yourself? And he's like, you know what? I want to do that. I want to be able to go into these fantasy worlds and shoot zombies in the face. And that's just my fantasy. I know it's a fantasy and I've always wanted to do it. So I'm going to do it. So people are going to want to do this. I think over in the long run, I suspect that people are going to find that there's going to be other things that they didn't even expect that they're going to want to do even more in VR. I think Tilt Brush is a perfect example of an experience that is pretty like an open blank canvas for you to do whatever you want and to express your creativity in that way. That, if any app is out there right now, Tilt Brush, I think is the killer app, just consistently across within the VR community and people having their first time VR experience and just being completely blown away. And I think it's also driving people to come back again and again and changing the way that our brains are wired. And it's just kind of living up to the potential of what we all want VR to be. And, you know, E3 also just happened. And I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the different debates and controversies that were coming out of the E3 discussion, because this goes into this discussion of exclusive versus cross-platform games within VR. Now, there's a couple of different camps here. One camp is Sony and Oculus, as well as Samsung, with a lot of exclusive titles. And then the other camp, we have the more cross-platform companies that aren't really driving or advertising exclusive titles, and that's the Vive as well as Google Daydream. So we have this tension between closed platform, walled gardens, and sort of open ecosystems. And this has kind of come to a head with this battle between exclusive titles and cross-platform titles. So at E3, there's a bunch of news coming out with Oculus, coming out with a few titles that were previously going to be cross-platform, but were now suddenly Oculus exclusives, including Superhot, as well as Giant Cop. And Palmer Luckey basically tweeted saying, hey, Sony's doing it, so we're going to do it too. So from the perspective of the platforms of Sony and Oculus, it makes complete perfect sense why they would want inclusive titles to be able to drive the audience to their platform only. From a consumer's point of view, whatever platform you want, you want to be able to play anything. But it's sort of like this console war mentality that's going into VR already. and people wanting to be able to buy things once and have access to every single VR title that's out there. But that is certainly not going to be happening within the first year of consumer VR and perhaps within the first five or 10 years. I think this closed walled garden ecosystem is going to have to be there for the beginning because a couple of reasons. I think first of all, I think It's a lot of risk for any game developer to produce a game, and so when you have a big company like Oculus or Sony willing to help support your title, then it's being able to actually create games that literally would not exist otherwise without that support. Also, VR is such an unproven market, you have these three legs of the stool with the hardware, with the content producers, and the audience. And we're just now introducing the audience into the equation, but the hardware and the game developers have been kind of going back and forth for a while trying to figure out what actually works, what can we do with the technology, what's fun, what's the engaging gameplay mechanics. And that iteration kind of requires a lot of R&D investment and time. And again, from both sides, in order for VR to be successful, Sony or Oculus couldn't release their platform hoping for the best and not knowing that they're going to have like solid content there. So, you know, imagine if Oculus Rift came out and there was Oculus Home with literally no games there, you know, that would be their worst case scenario. So they're trying to prevent that from being able to actually fund these games. But there's this larger debate that's happening between closed and open. And probably the biggest proponent of that is on the Reddit called PC Master Race. These are the PC gamers that absolutely hate exclusive titles and they want to have on their PC game to be able to have access to everything. And so both Oculus and Sony have been getting a lot of flack for promoting some of these exclusive titles. one other dimension of this closed versus open was with the oculus there was this plugin called revive where you could inject the signal and hijack what the signal that would normally be going to an oculus rift hmd and be able to play it on a vive so essentially if you have a vive you'd be able to play anything in the oculus home so what this kind of walled garden software that oculus was trying to create anyone with a vive could essentially have access to all of that and so it was kind of ruining this exclusivity for the hardware. There was a software update that basically broke the Revive control, and essentially what happened then was that in order to play the games, the Revive would have to completely bypass all DRM, which meant that anybody who was pirating these Oculus Home games could now play them for free and do them from the Vive. So then a few weeks later, the Vive announced that, hey, you know what? In SteamVR, we're going to integrate with both Oculus and Oculus Touch, which essentially means that all these games on the SteamVR were suddenly going to be available to play whether or not you had an Oculus Rift. So you buy an Oculus Rift, and you think you're going to only have access to the Oculus Home games. But essentially, Valve is making this move, saying, hey, we're for these open platforms. We want to do things that's best for the game developers because, you know, from Valve's perspective, they have SteamVR and they want the game developers to be able to buy their games on Steam. So as a consumer, you have this choice, like either you could buy the game on Oculus Home and it only works on the Rift or you buy it on Steam, the exact same game, and you could play it on the Rift and on the Vive. So what are consumers going to do? You're going to buy it on Steam and not on Oculus Home. So this larger strategic move of Valve, basically implementing all of this hardware technology for the Rift within SteamVR, put some more pressure on Oculus, I think, to then kind of backtrack on their previous position of putting in this hardware check that would make it so that you had to have a Rift in order to play anything from Oculus Home. So Oculus essentially reverted on that, and they kind of have this dual layer where they no longer have the hardware check, but they still have the DRM check. So Revive was able to honor the DRM for Oculus Home, so that it was protecting the software developers, and it still gives them access. Which, you know, if you take a step back and kind of look at how the Oculus Rift even got developed, it was essentially like Palmer Luckey having the mindset of a modder taking existing technology and modding it and doing all sorts of new things with it. So from Palmer's own values, something like Revive is something that he's obviously going to support and want and has been on the record saying that he was going to. But I think that the mindset of the closed platform and wanting to own ecosystem and have exclusive titles and have things exclusive to the hardware and everything like that, that mindset at Facebook and Oculus, the larger kind of business pressures kind of override Palmer's more idealistic open ethic that he's always had in his life. And he's kind of have to kind of do this dual role of being pragmatic for what the business needs are, but also do what's best for VR. So all that to say is that this whole battle between openness and closed, I think is, I don't think it's going to go away because I did this interview with Neil Trevitt back at GDC 2015. episode 104, and you should go listen to it to kind of hear this perspective from Vulkan. It's more of a low-level graphics API, but he's talking about these larger open versus closed ecosystems and dynamics, and he had given this talk where he was saying that, like, for every successful open standard, there's a proprietary competitor. So whether it's the OpenStandard of OpenGL versus the proprietary DirectX, or OpenCL versus NVIDIA's UDA, whether it's HTML5 versus Flash, you know, all these different examples of successful open source implementations have this kind of proprietary competitor, and there's like this competition that's going back and forth. And so I kind of see this same thing evolving from the open and closed, this walled garden proprietary versus the open, whether it's the Project Sansar, the more closed garden approach versus the open approach of High Fidelity, as well as kind of the more closed approach of NVIDIA versus the open approach of AMD and open sourcing a lot of their technologies. You know, all different dimensions of having proprietary competitors versus the open source implementations. I think it's a pretty common rule that the leading edge is always going to be the proprietary companies and that the open source implementations are going to be kind of struggling to catch up. And so the last point that I just wanted to bring in here is that just this past week there was this conference called VidCon and a VC named Mark Susser does these series of Snapchat videos called Snapstorms where he'll take a topic and do a whole lesson from anywhere from ranging from 5 to 10 minutes. So he had this online video part 2 where he was talking about the dynamics of the online video industry. And I think the really important point that he was making there is that if you look at the trend of what's happening with Netflix and HBO and Amazon Prime and Hulu and iTunes, is that these companies have figured out that the thing that is driving subscriptions to their service is exclusive content, specifically TV shows like Game of Thrones or House of Cards. Those longer 10 hour TV seasons are the things that are really hooking people in and driving their decision to actually join into that network. So if you look at the movie selection of some of these different companies, it's kind of been dwindling down to be pretty dismal. But The TV shows, you know, that's the thing that they have the real strength and they have a lot of exclusive content that's created in this fragmented market. So from the perspective of VC, they're saying like, hey, you know, this exclusive content is something that is going to be playing out even in, you know, Facebook Live versus Twitter video versus Snapchat video, you know, these different companies that have exclusive content within these platforms. are going to drive adoption. So I think it's just a economic design pattern that VR is going to follow that same route, that both Sony and Oculus are going to have this exclusive content. That said, if you get into some of these TV shows, you know how good they are. And part of that reason is because they have the money to get funded and they have these amazing experiences. So I think some experiences like the London Heist are going to be some of the best premiere interactive narrative stories that come out of anywhere. I think they have the capability to do something on a level that a lot of other companies don't yet. So there's certainly a lot of innovation that's happening when it comes to storytelling and gaming within these different divisions of Sony. But I think in the long run, it's going to be this battle that's going to be ultimately decided by consumers and the market demand. Will the market be able to step up and say, no, we're going to take an ideological stand against exclusives and we're going to vote with our dollars and not buy into either the Sony PlayStation VR or Oculus kind of walled garden ecosystems of exclusive content? Or are we going to go with something like the Vive and really support the openness that is better for both the game developers and perhaps the overall consumers in the long run? I think that this is going to be a battle that's going on for the next eight or nine years, up until at least the cryptocurrencies come and completely revolutionize how our economic systems work so that we're able to do more viable micropayments. And, you know, that's way down in the future to kind of change the entire economic systems. But the economic biases that we have right now, I just think it's a natural byproduct that we're going to have this open versus closed and exclusive versus cross-platform debate here for a while. So I just wanted to kind of riff on that. It's been a huge topic within the VR community within the last couple of weeks. And just wanted to add my thoughts by, you know, talking to somebody who is speaking from the perspective of that exclusive content. So if you enjoy learning all about the VR community and all the different dimensions of it from the Voices of VR podcast, then please do vote with your dollars and send some money my way to my Patreon so I can continue to travel around and grow the podcast, really get the foundation solidified so I can travel to all these different conferences and perhaps even expand into artificial intelligence and machine learning because I think that just like back in May of 2014 when I saw this tidal wave of VR coming and I started the Voices of VR podcast, I kind of feel the pull of artificial intelligence and machine learning is the next tidal wave that may be as big or even bigger than VR in the long run. So I'm excited to start to dive in there. But I want to get all the foundations solidified here in the Voices of VR podcast, get all my sponsors lined up. If you are interested in sponsoring the Voices of VR podcast in any capacity, then please send me an email at kent at kentbi.com. And yeah, we'll chat. So lots of great stuff coming on the Voices of VR podcast. So much traveling that I'm doing over the next two, three months. There's going to be a lot happening that I'm going to try to cover and then be releasing for the next six to eight months, I think. So if you'd like to support all my travels and everything, then please do consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
