In July, I was invited to give a talk about virtual reality at the bi-annual Illustration Conference with indie VR developer Ashley Pinnick, who studied as an artist and illustrator. On today’s Voices of VR podcast, we talk about the process of moving from 2D illustration to 3D VR art, some potential strategies for artists to get more involved in the process of virtual reality development, and the role of artists in creating digital avatars on the safe side of the uncanny valley.
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One of the big contributions that artists can make is to create stylized VR avatars that feel comfortably outside of the uncanny valley. Studies have shown that people prefer some level of stylization in their avatars, and so illustrators are particularly well-suited to help people construct their digital identities in VR and AR.
There’s also a lot of possibilities for artists to create surreal and stylized worlds for people to discover, and it’s becoming easier and easier for artists to create virtual reality experiences by using VR art programs. The most well-known programs are TiltBrush, Oculus Story Studio’s Quill, as well as Oculus Medium. VR artist Danny Bittman wrote a great getting started guide for VR artists and other VR artists like Liz Edwards are getting noticed for their art created within VR.
I expect to see a lot more breakout art VR experiences created by trained artists in 2017, and that Sketchfab will likely play a large role in helping to discover 3D artist talent just as YouTube has helped independent video creators be discovered.
Creating art in VR is turning out to be one of the big cultural contributions of virtual reality, and I told the artists at the Illustration Conference that I’m really interested to see what type of worlds and characters they build and stories they tell.
Here’s a video of some of the major points that I made at the 2016 Illustration Conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVZlvvIt_TQ
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So in 2016, I got a request to speak at an illustration conference about VR. So this was an audience of people who get together every two years, and they primarily use pen and paper and Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create 2D illustrations. And they wanted to learn more about virtual reality and how they could potentially get more involved. And so I had a panel discussion with Ashley Penick who is an independent virtual reality developer but also has a background in illustration and has actually previously attended the illustration conference. So in this interview today we're going to be talking about a lot of the major points that we were trying to convey and tell this larger community of illustrators but Since this interview, there's been a couple of other developments that's happened, especially with the tools that are available for artists to be able to create content within virtual reality. At the time, Tilt Brush was the only art tool that was really available for artists to get involved. But since the Oculus Touch has been released, there's also Quill to do illustration in 3D, but also Oculus Medium, which is a little bit more like sculpting in 3D. So I expect to see a huge explosion of art and creativity happening by artists who are working within virtual reality natively to create art that is either used in other video games or to be able to create entire virtual reality experiences within their own right. And one of the things that I mentioned in this podcast that I wanted to just expand on a little bit before we dive in is just the concept of the uncanny valley. And to me, this was one of the crucial concepts that points to illustrators and artists to playing a vital role in the future of virtual reality. For people who aren't familiar with the concept of the Uncanny Valley, the idea is that as you get more and more human-like, there's this curve that just has a cliff that drops off once you get to the point where it looks almost human-like, but not quite. It's almost like if you go too far with making something look like a human, and it doesn't actually look like a human, it's going to start to look like a zombie, or it's dead, and it's just going to look creepy. And that creepiness is in the pit of the Uncanny Valley. because it doesn't actually match your expectations for what a human should look like. And I think that there's an evolutionary explanation for that. When you were walking around and you would see a body that was dead, it would actually be very dangerous. And so you would just want to avoid it because it could actually kill you. And so if you see a character within a virtual reality experience and it doesn't have all the facial expressions and movement like you expect, then it starts to feel that same level of creepiness. And so the way that most people have gotten around this is to be on the other safe side of the uncanny valley by making the art style super stylized. So a lot of the animation studios, whether it's Pixar or Disney or DreamWorks, they all have their aesthetic for how they make that stylization. And so that's where the artists and illustrators start to come in is because Until we're able to really cross the chasm of the Uncanny Valley, we're going to be needing to have a lot of stylized art styles that make it just feel more comfortable to be in virtual reality experiences. So I just wanted to expand on that concept a little bit before we dive into the interview here with Ashley. So Ashley and I will be covering all the big points that we're making at the illustration conference on today's episode of the Wizards of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you and the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Ashley happened at the illustration conference on July 9th, 2016 in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:28.487] Ashley Pinnick: My name is Ashley Penick. I'm an artist, storyteller, and a VR developer. So I have an indie studio called California Wrecks. We're located in Los Angeles and we're working on a game right now called Dead Bug Creek. That's a VR adventure game. I also teach virtual reality at Art Center in their kids program. I teach a sort of unity and world building class. And I also just help out in various VR projects. I've worked on a couple things for Disney and Sony and now Lionsgate as well. So yeah, I sort of just cover the whole spectrum of different things.
[00:05:01.003] Kent Bye: So we're here at the ninth biannual illustration conference, and you have a background in illustration. I don't have a background in illustration, so I'm coming into this realm and learning about it. But coming from the world of illustration, it sounds like that as you were getting into VR, there wasn't a lot of understanding as to what or why you were doing it.
[00:05:22.401] Ashley Pinnick: Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I feel like people that I knew and people who are illustrators, they were really interested in using the computer for Photoshop or for Maya and After Effects and specific things where they're trying to make animations or they're trying to make digital paintings or speed up their process. But when it came to me wanting to start playing with virtual reality, people really didn't see the connection at first. There were some people who saw that, OK, yeah, maybe this could be interesting. It was mostly in the context of games, though. Not necessarily in the context of storytelling. And a lot of what I feel like people didn't understand was the sort of like human quality and the presence that you get in VR. Like people talk so much about that. The ability for people to sit down and really inhabit a story or a world that you build and how that's really advantageous for illustrators, designers, and artists.
[00:06:10.306] Kent Bye: Yeah, and for me, as I was invited to come speak to a bunch of illustrators who natively work with a lot of pen and paper and 2D representations, I had to really think about, like, what is the connection between illustration and VR? And one thought is, we talked a little bit about storytelling, and people are visual storytellers within graphic design and comics, and there's connections there that are new dimensions of storytelling, but I think You know, the thing that I think is probably resonating even more so is this whole phenomenon of the Uncanny Valley and to be able to create an art style that doesn't feel too photorealistic and gross when it's not able to climb that valley of the Uncanny Valley, but they're firmly on the other side of being able to create a very stylized and abstracted representation of a lot of symbolism through what they do. So, you know, maybe you could speak to that as a perspective of an illustrator.
[00:07:05.179] Ashley Pinnick: Absolutely. I think that illustrators have a lot to bring to it because of that. I think that illustrators solve a lot of visual problems and really streamline things in a way that give people understanding of complex issues, complex ideas. You see that a lot in editorial illustration where people find a way in, you know, just a few different elements on the page to really sum up the idea of something that might be like a really hard-hitting political article or it could be a story that somebody wrote and they can find a way to encapsulate that within an image and I think that the power to be able to organize that much information is something that bringing that into VR and being able to have a style that is not only low fidelity to the point where it can run on most of what's going out today, you know, a lot of the mobile stuff, like I know what we've talked about in the past, but also having the opportunity to take that style and use it in a way that has the same power as an image on the page and understanding that with that style comes certain advantages of being able to use it in a way that's expressive and has emotion in a different way than just representing the real world.
[00:08:09.585] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that some of my favorite VR experiences have been some of them that were a little bit lower fidelity, whether it's the night cafe where you're walking through a Van Gogh painting and just really seeing that hyper-stylized perspective with a lot of 3D modeling. I really enjoy the work of Khabibo and a lot of the abstract art experiences that he's created. Irrational Exuberance is another one that I think is low-poly, low-fidelity, but just amazingly beautiful and quite an amazing experience. And there's been some other approaches of trying to do 2D within a virtual world. So Koloss had a very distinct art style, as well as Sequenced that also is using this anime 2.5D where you're still seeing the depth, but having a very specific aesthetic and art style. And so what were some of your experiences where you have this deep sense of presence from these lower fidelity VR experiences?
[00:09:02.890] Ashley Pinnick: Well, I definitely agree that the Night Cafe is a great example. And the class I teach for kids, that's the first thing that I show them because I feel like a lot of kids, even at a young age, they're exposed to, you know, at least one or two Van Gogh paintings. You know, there's something really wonderful and whimsical about his work, and so you see them really latch on to stuff like that. I mean, even games that are sort of, like, arcade-y or puzzle-y, like Fantastic Contraption is so weird and wacky, but it has so many great things to bring to the table with that. I mean, I feel like you're building something but it's in this world that doesn't really exist and it's not meant to be real at all but I think that the design of it makes it even more fun and silly and that absurd quality of it is really great. Also even stuff like Job Simulator how it's very just I think that the style then sort of imbues the same sense of humor that's in something like that too and so if it was just the same thing as you know a real-life office it wouldn't have that same sort of punch and I think that That's what's so important about thinking about what it takes to make something that's great with the art in mind.
[00:10:03.411] Kent Bye: And so coming from a background of illustration, what were all the things and tools that you had to learn in order to do what you're doing now in VR?
[00:10:09.755] Ashley Pinnick: Yeah, so there was a lot of different stuff that I played with and then things I sort of stuck with, if that makes sense. Because at first I was wondering, okay, well, can I take my drawings and make them be 3D and be convincing? And at first, I sort of was afraid of going that way, just because I didn't know if it was going to work or not. So the first thing that I tried or I was thinking about doing was more sort of like a cardboard cutout or maybe some sort of like stage play that's animated kind of thing where you have a set or something that's built with two-dimensional slices that are in space. But I quickly abandoned that idea when I realized that even if not everything that I traditionally was doing with my illustration work would translate directly, that there was still a lot that I could bring over. So I just jumped in and started learning some 3ds Max and Maya. Those are the two places that I started. And then, you know, as I've gone on to do more ZBrush and learning things like that as well. And then obviously jumping into engines. Unity is the main engine that I'm using now, but I'll soon probably pick up Unreal as well, because why not? And just sitting down and having to learn about, okay, Why isn't this working? If it isn't, what's problematic in the design? Or can I think about it in a different way? You know, that when I turn my character in space, what is it going to actually look like from another angle? Things that I think that sometimes illustrators just don't really consider. Or it doesn't matter if it's as consistent, especially if his style is more raw or intuitive. That's not something people necessarily worry about. So I think it was something I had to learn was to think about the consistency of my characters and having them not just be one good drawing, but something that really felt like it could exist in some sense of a virtual world. So yeah, I mean, 3D modeling programs, obviously, and Unity were the main two. But then jumping into tutorials about learning C Sharp, learning JavaScript, trying to figure out how, all right, how can I take all these things and put them together in a way that can tell the story that I want to? And how much interaction can I pull out of it and have it be meaningful?
[00:12:04.279] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things I mentioned on the panel, because we were on a panel discussion talking to illustrators about virtual reality, and that it feels like right now is going to be the hardest to create VR, and that it's only going to become a lot easier over time. And I recommended a lot of the illustrators to go try to find a way to do Tilt Brush, because it feels like that is the most natural transition for a lot of their skill set to be able to paint in 3D, but also be able to eventually export that into a file and then create entire VR experiences based upon what they have created within VR. Because it's quite a lot of translation of trying to take something that is a 3D world and try to create it through this 2D interface. There's a lot of different things that it's not intuitive and so you have to learn how to think in that way. But yet, creating within VR, there's no translation. You just do it and then you see it immediately.
[00:12:55.707] Ashley Pinnick: Absolutely. I think that it's really being able to work in VR will create a lot of opportunities to not have as much iteration back and forth because I know that's something that I deal with a lot. Even if I can see it and represent it as a 3D model when I'm looking at it on the screen, sometimes things feel different when I bring it into VR and I'm doing QA in my game. I'll have to push things or pull things in a specific way because it just doesn't feel quite right once I'm actually looking at it. Sometimes I'll have to mess with proportions of characters because it doesn't feel quite right when I'm looking at it. I'm six feet tall and the character's three feet tall, things like that. But yeah, I think that Tilt Brush is a really great place for people to start because it's just sort of ribbons in space and you can build them in so many different ways into so many different objects. I'd really love to see more of that stuff animated if somebody could export an FBX of it and rig that and give it all these different qualities of a traditional 3D model where it's animated and can run around and do stuff. I think that would be really interesting to see how we could make Tilt Brush be sort of its own art style. I think that would be really interesting. I've also seen some amazing things that people have done with it who don't typically work in 3D. Even that Glen Keane aerial illustration is just beautiful on its own. They're still using the ideas of foreshortening and perspective and pulling and pushing things in different ways that I think only artists can do.
[00:14:13.885] Kent Bye: Why did you move from experimenting with 2D and go into 3D? What was it that made you decide to make the jump from just doing billboards in 2D within a 3D environment like Unity and then go full on with learning how to model in Maya?
[00:14:27.615] Ashley Pinnick: I think it was sort of just things snowballing and realizing that maybe I was capable of more than I originally realized. Because I think at first, you know, it just feels like there's a mountain of stuff you have to get through in order to understand how to make VR or just make something, you know, in a different medium in general. I think it's the same thing that I've seen people go through when they're traditionally just drawing with pencil to learning how to do an oil painting. It's very, you know, just trying to figure out how to make something that has legs, you know, that can stand up and be a thing and not feel like it's weak. Right? And so I think that the thing I was afraid of was that if the 3D models weren't the way that I sort of imagined them in my head that they couldn't ever get there. But then I realized that once I started learning the different things that it wasn't quite as hard as I thought it might be. And I think a lot of it just came down to just trying to not let the fear get the best of you of trying something new. And the reason why I wanted to do it all to begin with really comes back to having a lifelong interest in art and technology working together and being able to use those things in different ways. Because at the time I was making art that was not three-dimensional, but it was about computer history and like early vector graphics. And I love all of those sorts of things, like learning about how the computer itself came to be. So for me, I think that I realized I was making work about the computer, why not? you know, jump into something and work with technology more because I was playing with this dumb terminal that I got from an electronic scrapyard and I was just enjoying all of this different stuff, starting to play with Raspberry Pi and making things like that. But I realized that I could start using virtual reality because all of that stuff was starting to just come about at the same time. It was serendipitous, you know. So I was able to take all of this stuff I was working with already and start trying to bring it somewhere else.
[00:16:10.428] Kent Bye: Being here at the illustration conference and seeing a lot of different artists and comics show different presentations, I really get this sense of this is a group of people that have really refined a craft of visual storytelling. And I'm curious from your perspective what VR storytelling can learn from the storytelling that's happening within this illustration and artist community here.
[00:16:33.165] Ashley Pinnick: Oh, that's a good question. I feel like you're right. There's so many people at Icon who have been doing this for years and are always experimenting and trying to learn something more and bring something to the table where they're always pushing boundaries. But something I think is really interesting about the illustration community is that so many people, even if the stories aren't about something that they experience specifically, with visual storytelling, it always comes back to this core idea about something they really care about and having this passion for something and having this need to express it. And I feel like I see a lot of really amazing work coming out of VR, but then it would also be amazing to see how you can begin to play with the idea of people who have a thing, you know, the auteur in VR, right? And having somebody who is able to tackle subjects in a specific way. or is able to express themselves specifically through VR because of what they're talking about and I think that that's what makes illustration and comics so special is you know like sort of the flavor that you're going to get from this person and you feel like you know them better through their work and that's really meaningful for a lot of people.
[00:17:34.236] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that another thing that's really striking for me to drop into this community that I really don't know a lot about is that I get the sense that there's a lot of introverted artists who are freelancers, and that this conference is where they all come together every two years to be able to share and form community and learn from each other, but also connect in different ways. There's a challenge there with so many different freelancers to be able to Already kind of sustain the businesses that they have and to continue that and then to dive into these new immersive Technologies that the learning curve is so high I can imagine that a good thing to try out is for them to reach out to game jams and show up and see how they could offer their skills and maybe pair up with someone who does 3d modeling but A lot of concept art, a lot of storyboarding, a lot of character design, avatar design, scene creation, world building, all these things I think that illustrators have this particular skill and craft that they've been able to cultivate that they could be able to apply to VR, but yet it's difficult for someone who has those skills to just start creating VR because there's just so many other tools. So I see potential collaborations, but money and financing is an issue. They're not going to get paid. It's something that would have to be free work and experimental and hope and pray that would lead to something else, but still needing to have a team around you. So from you, how do you see this kind of evolving for, you know, how can these illustrators kind of get more involved into this virtual reality revolution that's just starting?
[00:19:03.907] Ashley Pinnick: Well, I feel like, you know, there was a talk, I think it was yesterday where somebody said, just start, you know, and I mean, that's always an oversimplification, but at the same time, I think that you make a good point about game jams and things like that. I think that if people want to, you know, take a weekend, you know, that's not as much time as it might take to sit down and really earnestly say, all right, I want to make this project and I don't have any income to do it. I still have to pay my bills or do my freelance and maybe, It's not going to work out, but I think that the game jam idea or, you know, having the opportunity to do things where, you know, it's just a hackathon 48 hours, see how you feel working with other people who have those skills that you may need that you don't have. I think that's a really good place to start. I think that moving forward, it'd be great to see communities that are able to support content more because I know that's something that I struggle with as a content creator is finding that funding for your content because I feel like a lot of investors aren't necessarily looking to invest in content. I understand why, you know, but finding a way to bring that more towards maybe, I mean, I know that people already freelance a little bit with doing different things for VR companies. I think that that's definitely a model that exists. It's something I've used. to freelance for other companies and help them with character design or even thinking about how they can implement interaction to an existing brand for some type of experience they want to make. I think that that stuff already exists and is a good place to start and I think that if people understand early on the value of an artist that building that into their funding model would obviously help quite a bit for everybody and make the work better.
[00:20:43.357] Kent Bye: Tomorrow I leave to go to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, where I'm going to be talking to a lot of these researchers that are really looking at machine learning and artificial intelligence. And one of the things that I think is really striking and applicable to this community of illustrators is this concept of a convolutional neural network, which is able to take a design style and you are able to essentially do some edge detection with the neural network and to take the art style from artistic creation and illustration and apply it to a photo. So I see this future where artists are going to be feeding artificial intelligent neural networks seed images to create a design aesthetic that a lot of the lower level minutiae that we have to do within Maya, I think it's going to be simplified and there's going to be companies and different approaches to be able to very quickly design a look and feel of an entire space based upon some of those seed images. But then after that, to then go in and correct it and tweak it based upon their own aesthetic. I think the AI is going to be able to take it to a certain point and take care of a lot of lower level stuff. But yet, I think there's always going to be a need for that artist to be able to refine it, but also to provide the original inspiration.
[00:21:57.273] Ashley Pinnick: Absolutely and I think that's a really interesting thing to think about especially when you're working with a small team or if you don't have a lot of funding if you have access to that kind of technology and it doesn't cost you you know an arm and a leg then it could be really interesting. I mean I know we were talking earlier about this a bit and the idea of just like Andy Warhol's factory even about how he didn't do the silkscreens but they're still his you know it brings up ideas about like ownership and what art actually means and I could totally see fine artists take the idea of artificial intelligence and really take it to the extreme and see what they can do with it. I mean, because I feel like there are already fine art plays with technology in so many different ways depending on the artist. I think that it could be really great. And I also think that artificial intelligence, I mean, it also makes me think about what is ownership, right? If anybody could take your art and then run it through a network like that and get the same style as you, you know, and how do we mitigate that. I mean, it creates a whole set of questions, but I also think it creates a whole new realm of possibilities. It could be really interesting.
[00:22:56.228] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's already started to happen with being able to train up a neural network to be able to recreate the art style of Blade Runner. And so they generated completely new scenes from this neural network, but they got copyright takedown notices because they thought it was from the original movie, but it wasn't. But that's another point that I think, you know, is coming up for me as well as the copyright issues of being able to take an art style and then just, you know, send it through this process that abstracts it out and applies it and you may not be able to claim that you created it but there is a lot of intellectual property issues that I think that artists are gonna potentially be exploited by Taking images off of image search or off social media and being able to take it and just apply it and propagate it out into their Experiences especially at this point when there's really not a lot of money within VR streams for creators to be able to you know pay up front for stuff like that as well and
[00:23:49.610] Ashley Pinnick: Yeah, I think you're right. I think that it creates a whole set of questions about that for sure. And when I think about AI and on all those different things, it makes me wonder about process also, because for so many fine artists and illustrators, a lot of their work is about the process of making it that makes it special. It's not as much about the end result as it is about the journey for them as well. And that's also what gives a lot of artists their fuzzy feeling, you know, is that feeling of making the work. And I think that at one end of the spectrum, your art can become work, especially if you have a mountain of stuff to do and you have a tiny team. So in a way, it can help. But then in another way, I think it also takes away that part of the process that's the discovery, you know, because if you can't, I feel like for me, I enjoy making things all the time, no matter what. And even if sometimes I get frustrated with the fact that I have like 50 things that I need to do, at the end of the day, I think that that practice and putting in that time and that due diligence also lets you grow as an artist and lets your work change and morph over time so that when you look back in three to five years, your style isn't really a style, it's your continual evolution. So it also makes me wonder about how artists will evolve in the future and how AI plays into that.
[00:25:01.275] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:25:07.519] Ashley Pinnick: Well, I mean, if we're talking in the scope of Icon and everything that we've been thinking about, something that keeps coming back to me when I was thinking about us talking to this audience is also about the idea of creating memories in VR and really having artists have the possibility to sit down and make something that then you can create a memory inside or that you have memories of experiencing. as well as the idea of building a world that's for other people and how they live and exist in it, even if it's a virtual world. I think that that's a really elegant and beautiful possibility when it comes to virtual reality, especially as we get better tracking and room scale becomes even more possible for less money or bigger scale as far as being able to track a huge room instead of a smaller room. daisy-chaining your lighthouses and all that kind of stuff. I think that all of those things open up infinite possibilities of how an artist creates work and how they show their work. Maybe you don't need to install your work in a huge gallery in order to show it someplace, or maybe you can bring somebody into the world of your work in a completely different, new way. I think that that's really a wonderful thing for artists to try to do in virtual reality, and it's becoming more and more possible every day.
[00:26:22.991] Kent Bye: Anything else that's left unsaid you'd like to say?
[00:26:24.988] Ashley Pinnick: Hmm. I think that anybody who's feeling sort of unsure about whether or not they have a place in the VR world, especially as an artist or a designer or an illustrator, I think that there's so much that people can do. You know, graphic designers can redefine what UX means in VR. And I mean, I think that's sorely needed. I mean, eventually I'm sure we'll evolve a past like cards in space that tell you things. I mean, I'm excited to see what that is. I don't know what it is. And I think that that's something that I would love to see people doing is trying to solve problems that we never had until right now with their work and their designs and their art.
[00:27:01.843] Kent Bye: Yeah, especially, and I know we talked a bit about augmented reality, you know, coming down a few years down the way as well, but just Snapchat filters and these filters of these faces and avatars, I think illustrators are going to have even a bigger role, I think, in the augmented reality world because there's going to be a little bit of a 2D representation that's kind of projected onto the world and being able to track the world dynamically and then be able to feed those seed images that are able to be moved and altered, I think, we've already started to see this huge explosion of people taking on these digital representations of their identity and being able to record themselves and I'm really noticing how those characters and filters that people are putting on actually change the way they talk and they kind of really embody the characters in new ways and so I think you know VR is in a lot of ways a stepping stone into AR that's going to be much bigger and more prominent. But I think that a lot of those things that you're actually seeing that's kind of overlaid into reality, that there's a lot of ways for designers and illustrators to get involved there as well.
[00:28:06.160] Ashley Pinnick: Absolutely, I completely agree. I mean Snapchat filters are, yeah, I feel like it's something that people were a little bit afraid of for a second and then they totally embraced it and I see them all the time and I think that it's really interesting to think about how your work can become more dynamic even if it is 2D and especially in an augmented reality world, you know, how can your work react dynamically to what it's being placed over, you know, how can you create this whole sort of conversation between the artist and the person who is using the augmented reality device by having it be, you know, react in different ways or having these sort of silly things or unexpected things happen when you're in an AR space. I also think it's really important for artists to have a hand in this and designers as well because it helps organize things. in a way that is accessible for people. And I think that there's so much underlying design in everything that we use, from technology to art and everything in between, that none of that can go untouched by artists. Because I think that they're the people that really help organize and create culture and make things like augmented reality more meaningful for people.
[00:29:09.075] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:29:10.536] Ashley Pinnick: Thank you, Kent.
[00:29:12.290] Kent Bye: So that was Ashley Pennick. She's an artist, storyteller, and independent VR creator with her company, California Rex. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, it was really interesting to hear Ashley's description of being in art school at the time when virtual reality was really starting to make its break into the early days of consumer VR when the developer kits were still out there. And There was a lot of confusion as to why she was, as an illustrator and artist, getting into this 3D medium of virtual reality. And she decided at some point to go ahead and use a lot of the 3D tools like Maya and 3ds Max and to learn programming with C Sharp and JavaScript to be able to use Unity to create the types of stories that she wanted to tell within virtual reality. And when we were at the illustration conference, it was kind of difficult to judge the reaction to a lot of the illustrators that were there. I think for them, it was still pretty early for them to make the leap into creating virtual reality experiences, especially since a lot of the computer systems and everything cost in the order of $2,000 to really get ramped up within a high-end virtual reality headset along with a computer that you need. And so if they didn't already have that equipment, then it's quite a high barrier of entry for them to get into. But my take is that I think that some of the virtual reality experiences that I'm actually most interested in seeing people create are these hyper stylized art worlds that Really take you to another place and looking at a lot of the art styles of these creators One of the things that Ashley said is that with the visual storytelling styles with a lot of these creators it becomes much more about the personal emotions that they're embedding within the art and and they're really attached to the stories that they're telling and so you start to get connected to your favorite illustrator or comic book artists and it's those types of artists that are able to create a distinctive look and style that I think actually is something that makes a lot of the video games so compelling as well as the art style just helps to transport and immerse you into a completely another realm. Now in terms of artificial intelligence, I do think that as we go forward here over the next five to ten years, we're going to start to see a lot more of these style transfer type of AI techniques to be able to see the look and feel of an entire immersive virtual reality experience. by coming up with a 2D painting and then doing some AI feature detection and then applying it to an entire 3D immersive scene. This is something that I haven't seen a lot of yet, but I expect to see a lot more of that within 2017 for sure, and to make it a lot easier to create these hyper stylized and surreal worlds. We talked about the Night Cafe by Matt Coley, which was one of the winners of the Gear VR Mobile Game Jam. back in 2015, and Mac Coley was able to essentially recreate this feeling of stepping into a Van Gogh painting. And it just has this completely transportive experience when you use it on the Gear VR. It's still today one of my favorite experiences to show to people, just because it is so transportive into taking you into this completely other realm. And I think the final point that Ashley is making about the ultimate potential of VR is that artists have the potential to create memories that are completely impossible to create without using the medium of art to be able to do that. You know, one of the things that Marshall McLuhan has said about any new medium is it starts to replicate the affordances of the previous mediums before you're able to really explore what the unique capabilities of this medium are. And I think actually one of the unique capabilities of VR is to be able to transport you into completely surreal worlds that you'd never be able to experience otherwise. And so Ashley is saying that there's a huge potential for these artists to create entire worlds for people to step into and to potentially blaze new neural pathways within the mind. And to me, that's one of the most exciting things about VR. And I am just really looking forward to what artists are going to be able to create within the VR medium. And finally, just a quick note about Snapchat is that that was another thing that we mentioned to the group of illustrators is one of the areas where there's been a lot of interfacing with the skill set of illustrators is to create these Snapchat filters where you're really creating this illustration avatar. And from my own personal experience of using the Snapchat filters is that just by taking these stylized art and to be able to look into my screen and to have a mirror to myself with this outfit that I'm wearing, it completely changes the way that I see myself and the way that I talk. And it's just really amazing to me the power and impact of my own identity to be able to take some digital representation and to be able to project it onto myself through a mobile phone. And I just imagine that that's gonna be even more powerful as more and more augmented reality applications come about. to be able to do that in real time and also in spatial 3D, but also in virtual reality as we are able to explore these different dimensions of our own identity as we put on these different costumes and these different masks as we are interacting with different people. So the way that art is actually dynamically interacting with us in the process of our construction of our identity and how we express ourselves, that is going to be one of the major contributions of art and immersive technologies. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for joining me on the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and become a donor to the podcast. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference. So go to patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
