Christine Heller is the co-founder and CEO of VR Playhouse, and she gave a talk with her co-founder Ian Forester at SVVR 2016 titled “How Fantasy Becomes Form” about the process of starting up a 360-degree video production studio. I had a chance to catch up with Christine at SVVR to talk about some of her main points, as well as talk about how VR Playhouse wants to bring a psychedelic consciousness to VR in order to potentially activate dormant portions of our brain and ultimately enable us to bring more liberation into our every day lives. We discuss some of these larger visions of VR, what Burning Man has to teach VR, her favorite narrative VR experiences, and the future of interactive storytelling within VR.
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Below are some of VR Playhouse’s 360-degree video productions:
Missing Pieces – Honda 360 music video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWUfiTvSGZ4
D∆WN: ‘Not Above That’ VR Experience
Profile of VR Playhouse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcEIU2QvrpU&t=10s
VR Playhouse Sizzle Reel
Teaser of “Surrogate,” an interactive CGI mixed with 360 video
Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
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. On today's episode, I have Christina Heller, who is the CEO and co-founder of VR Playhouse, which is a 360-degree video production studio. So Christina gave a presentation at SVVR about how fantasy becomes form, where she started to talk about the process of getting all the technology together in order to run a 360-degree production studio. And we talk about some of the deeper intentions that they are trying to do at VR Playhouse, such as trying to bring more of a psychedelic consciousness into VR and to give you some sort of simulated experience of liberation within a virtual reality experience so that you can come out and know what it feels like to be able to have more liberation within your life. So we'll be talking about that and some of the lessons that Burning Man can teach virtual reality. So that's what we'll be talking about 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 happened at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference at the end of April at the San Jose Convention Center. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:47.520] Christina Heller: I'm Christina Heller. I am the CEO and co-founder of VR Playhouse. We are a creative studio and full service production company that specializes exclusively in VR and AR.
[00:01:58.768] Kent Bye: Great. So tell me a bit about what you've done so far in VR or AR.
[00:02:03.117] Christina Heller: Sure. Well, in 2015, as we were building our studio, we did 15 projects, a lot of which were paying client work. Some of the highlights I would say from last year were, was the collaboration we did with Missing Pieces for their Honda 360 music video with Moses Sumney. It's a really, honestly, I think it's one of the more fun 360 videos out there. And we did all the 360 production support and post-production on that piece. And then we did all of the post-production on the Lion King. Circle of Life piece that came out last year, too. That was a really, really fun 360 video. And we also worked with Brain Farm on a bunch of action sports pieces. So that was the client side of things. And then internally, we were able to squeeze in one original project that we worked with a writer-director named Peter Flaherty on called The Surrogate. And The Surrogate was sort of everything coming together. It was 360 video, CGI, and interactive. And it is the story of a woman who has a nervous breakdown and retreats to live inside the walls of her own house, and she hires a surrogate to act out her life for her with her husband. So you can navigate the hallways using your gamepad or your controller, and at the end of each hallway is a portal that you can look into and see a room of the house, like the kitchen or the living room, and you watch these scenes play out between the surrogate and the husband. And we premiered it at South by Southwest and it was nominated for an Innovation Award. And the innovation was specifically in the storytelling arena of VR.
[00:03:27.123] Kent Bye: Great, so I know that you're mixing a lot of things there in terms of live action, CG, interactivity. You know, the one thing that comes to mind is that, how do you use physical spaces to help tell the story? And it sounds like you're kind of structuring the narrative by going through a physical space and being able to see things. So talk a bit about some of your early investigations in terms of structuring narrative through that physical space, but other kind of insights that you got as well.
[00:03:53.126] Christina Heller: Well, the physical space of a 360 or VR piece is incredibly important. It sets the tone for the entire piece. In The Surrogate, we explore the idea of immersive hemispheres. So in each hemisphere, you sort of have the option to explore a certain narrative or story. And I think that The Surrogate, in some ways, was a template. And I would like to explore that template more. You know, in the piece, you follow this couple as they move from room to room. But I would love to do a story where instead of following a couple, every room had different action going on inside of it. And you could choose to sort of watch what was happening in the portals of each room. And then maybe if you went back and looked in the portals again, you would see new content, fresh content. And so I think that's just the beginning. It's just scratching the surface of exploring physical environments in virtual reality and seeing how that can enhance a storytelling experience. And, yeah.
[00:04:46.018] Kent Bye: And also, it seems like because you're in this realm of making these 360 video productions, and we're kind of in this transition phase of trying to blend the best of the insights from the film production, but we're adding all these video game design elements, and we're kind of meshing them together and seeing what works and what doesn't work. So, from your experience this past year, I'm just curious, some of the things that you see work really well, and other things that you tried out discover that they don't translate well into VR?
[00:05:15.908] Christina Heller: That's a really interesting question. So some of the early experiments we did were with a piece we did in-house called First Person and it was kind of a passion project of mine in particular where I wanted to explore intimacy inside the VR headset. One of the things I think is sort of unique about experiencing a story inside of a VR headset is that you are alone with whoever you're interacting with and this is specifically looking at it from like a first-person perspective and I felt like it was such a unique experience, you know, you can't look at your phone, you can't look at your computer, you're completely immersed and you're there with this other person and so I wanted to explore like emotional intimacy inside the headset and as a result kind of worked on this series that was a little bit of like dating romance series. But one of the things that I got criticism for and I think was valid for the few people that actually watched the piece, which I never actually published, but I might at some point soon as what we're calling the V archives of VR Playhouse. But it didn't take advantage of the full 360. You know, people were like, okay, it's cool that I'm sitting across the table from this person and I'm interacting with them. But I either kept looking around and like wondering what was going to happen next. So that was sort of one of the early lessons for me was like, intimacy is not enough. You really do need to kind of play with the 360. I think we also learned that you can cut. I mean, like, there's been this, like, sort of, oh, you can't cut in VR sort of thing. But you can, and you just have to be deliberate about it and make sure that you're conscious of where the action is happening and where the viewer's eye will logically go and then use that to the advantage to make a cut happen. And then you can actually make a pretty thrilling cut in the action if you are thinking about sort of where the viewer will naturally be looking. And so that was, again, something we learned.
[00:06:52.696] Kent Bye: What have been some of your favorite examples of storytelling in VR so far?
[00:06:57.098] Christina Heller: Well, I know it's an older piece, but I'm a really big fan of Clouds Over Sidra. I think that that, for me, was like the first VR piece I saw that affected me emotionally. It's just really well done. You know, it's a story about a girl in a camp, and it's sort of what her day-to-day life is like. And so that, for me, was one that really stuck out to me. I recently watched a piece that was done at a fashion show, but they used close-ups for the first time that I thought was an interesting thing in VR, where there were boxes of close-ups happening while I was inside the 360 space. And I think that there's a lot more that can be done with that, where the boxes could represent a subjective experience and something that you're seeing close up while you're immersed in a 360 video or space. While you were talking, I started thinking about other VR experiences that I like, and I started thinking about robot repair. It's kind of in some ways the polar opposite of Clouds Over Sidra, because it's a completely animated environment where you're given tasks, but you're following a story as it happens. I guess I think that where the sweet spot is going to be is somehow blending those things. I think that we, as humans, really enjoy seeing other real humans in things. But there's been this big gap between 360 video and the CGI, sort of interactive stuff. And I think that there's a lot of hope for the light field cameras and the things that are coming. And I think when we finally get that technology at an accessible point, where we can explore real environments in the same way that we can explore things like robot repair, I mean, I just think that that is when it really starts to get interesting. And then, of course, there's the social stuff, you know, and I think that there are opportunities for storytelling in a social way, too, inside VR that, again, haven't really been explored too much, but I'm excited about.
[00:08:49.872] Kent Bye: So we're here at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, and you just gave a talk, and so I'm curious about what some of the big points that you were trying to make to the audience here.
[00:08:57.786] Christina Heller: Right. Well, our talk was called How Fantasy Becomes Form, and I jokingly said it was a blend of the practical and the pretentious, and it kind of was. But the thing is, we're still at this point where VR is so exciting and there's so much hype around it, and I think everybody can kind of see in their minds what we're trying to achieve inside VR and where it's going, and that's why billions of dollars have been invested into it. But the truth is that the actual making of VR right now is very challenging. I mean, that's what we do at VR Playhouse. We actually make it, you know, sitting there at a computer, clicking away on screens. And, you know, in the last year, we've built, you know, 10 Nuke-licensed workstations. We have a 90-machine render farm now. You know, these were the sorts of things that we had to buy and integrate into our workflow in order to be able to make the things of our imaginations. and even still we're doing overnight renders and stuff like that. So for us, one of the biggest challenges is meeting the excitement around the space and being able to deliver on that excitement in sort of the timeframe that I think a lot of people want to see that kind of content delivered. So, you know, there's a lot of new content makers out there, and we were new content makers two years ago. We had what I would call, in 2014, we'll call it the 360 beginner's toolkit. You know, it was like the 360 video, the autopano, the Alienware laptop, and sort of our complete and total dedication to making content for VR. We've now progressed to like what I just said, where this really robust, really intense creative studio. I was just trying to sort of give people a little bit of boots on the ground sort of perspective of what it's been like to be building this company from the ground up without investors and just what they should be mentally prepared for if they're trying to make their visions become reality in the way that they want. But I think it's a worthy pursuit. You know, that's kind of what the second part was about. That was what the more pretentious part was about. It's a worthy pursuit because the possibilities for what VR could do to us as humans, you know, I say before like computers connected us, but then they isolated us behind screens. VR has the capability of taking all that connectedness and bringing our full humanity to it. the potential is just like mind-boggling. So it's a worthy pursuit. It's one that we should absolutely grab by the horns and go for, but I want to give a real perspective to people who are out there trying to make the content that it is extremely challenging and the tools are still just being developed.
[00:11:20.478] Kent Bye: It's kind of echoing what I was mentioning earlier, that with all this technology, it's enabling us to explore our imaginations and these fantasy realms. So now that you've built this infrastructure, Playhouse VR, then what does that enable you to do? Or what type of things could you do now that you couldn't do before?
[00:11:37.043] Christina Heller: Well, I think that one of the fun things about running a creative studio, rather than just being a creative filmmaker, is that we get to collaborate. So I am excited about using this robust infrastructure and partnering with some of the great minds of our day to make the coolest content available. I mean, I think that before we built the studio, it was a little bit, you know, I don't want to say BS, but you know, you don't want to promise something you can't actually deliver on. I mean, now I know we can deliver on making stuff. So I know that inside VR Playhouse, the kinds of things that get us excited are things that are transformative, things that, you know, maybe play in a little bit to a psychedelic consciousness or something along those lines, things that when people take off the headset, they feel changed or their lives are richer for having put on that headset. We typically don't go for things like horror, you know, although that will be a huge genre and there's plenty of people getting into it and it will be very popular. At VR Playhouse, that's not kind of the stuff that gets us really excited. We're excited about Ian says liberation inside the headset that then you can take off the headset and bring to your real life because you have experienced liberation inside the headset and So yeah, and and in less kind of broad and expansive terms I say we like things that are fun We like things that are playful. We like things that are exciting and so this year I think our goal as a company is to be able to do as many of these original sort of works that VR Playhouse produces in between the client work that we have to make and that we're privileged to make to keep the company thriving. We have a piece coming out soon that is a little bit of a look at that kind of thing. We're working with this artist named Dawn Richard. She's an independent artist who has a pretty dedicated following on YouTube and we're doing like a really trippy, crazy video with her. I think she's going to be the first African-American woman, female artist to be making a 360 video. So that's kind of exciting, bringing like new, fresh, diverse voices into the VR space. So we're working on that now. The song is called not above that and the video should be coming out I think sometime in the next two to three weeks and it's just gonna be like you're flying through space, you know, like you're on a spaceship, she's dancing in body paint, like just wacky and fun.
[00:13:46.346] Kent Bye: And when you mention psychedelic influences, maybe you could expand on that a little bit in terms of what you mean and where you see that going.
[00:13:52.765] Christina Heller: Well, I think that we perceive with our senses a certain amount of data and if you've had the opportunity to try psychedelics, one of the things that I can think can be very eye-opening about it is you realize that there's other ways of perceiving the exact same reality that we're in right now just by like kind of tweaking your brain a little bit. You know things look different you can perceive shapes and patterns that like normally like right now I don't really see and so, you know, not everybody is interested in taking psychedelics. I understand that and so I think that there be a way of taking what is that psychedelic consciousness that of kind of connectedness and of Patterns and taking that into the VR world. I mean the thing that's fun about VR is that it it's like theater but like with like VFX you know so you can be in a reality that feels almost as real as the one you're in but alter it in any way that you artistically choose. So in my mind you know bringing some of those sort of interesting mind-opening experiences that you know some of us at VR Playhouse have had the chance to experience and bring it to people who aren't interested in taking mushrooms or LSD or something I think that that's really cool and I think there's an opportunity for growth and healing that comes with that. I mean they've done a lot of studies where psychedelics do have a lot of therapeutic benefits but I also know that it can be scary and so I think that you know it can be a bridge for people.
[00:15:18.190] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've seen some MRIs of people who are on LSD and, you know, the thing that seems to happen is that your brain starts to get activated in different ways. And so with psychedelics, I imagine that there's a very physical component of things that's actually physically changing your body, but you're kind of having these visual hallucinations that come as a result of that. And so I guess I wonder kind of limits of how far you could just give the visual stimulus of that and still give some sort of simulcrum of a psychedelic experience.
[00:15:46.466] Christina Heller: Well, they say that VR affects your neural pathways in the same way that memories and dreams do. And so I think that it is possible through audio and visual stimuli to activate certain brain centers that may be dormant or link parts of it that might not otherwise have been linked. Again, the part of the fantasy becomes form thing. I mean, that's the fantasy. The truth is we have to experiment. We have to try to make these pieces. And who knew that could take like six months to make that thing, you know? But I do think that that's the promise of VR. And I think that in my limited experience of some of the cooler content that's out there, I know that I feel different coming out than I go in.
[00:16:28.882] Kent Bye: What are some of the examples of that?
[00:16:30.938] Christina Heller: Well, we have this cool Android Jones piece where you kind of fly through a psychedelic space. Again, I know I talked about Robot Repair, but for me, that was a really transcendent experience the first time I did it because I was in a very bad mood that day that I tried Robot Repair. And someone was like, oh, you should watch this VR piece. And I was like, no, screw VR. I hate VR. I see it every day. They're like, no, you should try it. And I put it on. And by the time I came out of it, I felt so much better. I felt like a kid. I laughed so much. So that's one of them. I also really loved the Van Gogh piece. I forget what it's called. Night Cafe?
[00:17:06.133] Kent Bye: Yeah, the Night Cafe, yeah.
[00:17:07.233] Christina Heller: Night Cafe. Night Cafe was another one of those where I went in, I explored the Van Gogh paintings, and I came out, and I truly felt like I had been transported. I was in a different and more exciting world there for a few minutes. And all of a sudden, I came out. I was like, oh, here I am at my desk. Yeah, I think that that's the cool thing It's not that I want to spend my entire life in VR But like little blasts at a time in your like day that maybe is otherwise a little uninspiring could be really really exciting So, what do you want to experience in VR then? I would like to explore more imaginary worlds. I would love to go to beautiful imaginary places and have stimulating, interesting conversations with people inside of imaginary places. I think that's sort of, again, I touched on it briefly, the social thing. And it's interesting, because we at VR Playhouse, we haven't done a lot with social yet. And I think it's just because we're still, like, honestly working so darn hard to just get our heads wrapped around all the tech to make the interactive pieces that we're making already. But, like, we just haven't started to tackle the social stuff. But for me personally, like, I am very excited about being able to interact and play with people in virtual environments. in my fantasy of like what a really great VR experience would be, it would be to be in a world much more beautiful and elegant than perhaps the one that we are in right now and be able to engage and have exciting, interesting conversations with people who may live on the completely other side of the globe and learn something and experience something just like out of my dreams.
[00:18:47.136] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting to use the physical space to set a context and to cultivate a culture that is emergent and perhaps unique to that environment.
[00:18:56.120] Christina Heller: Burning Man. Like, yeah, exactly. I mean, I wouldn't want to make Burning Man because Burning Man already exists. But I think Burning Man is a good example of, like, if you take people and you put them in a completely different environment, how it can transform the way we interact with each other and the types of experiences we have.
[00:19:11.197] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think the big thing at Burning Man as well is that they have a certain amount of values and rules that they have that people are there, and so you are able to get, at scale, behaviors that you don't see when the rules are kind of like a commerce and exchange as well.
[00:19:25.493] Christina Heller: You just triggered a thought that I haven't brought up much when I talk about VR but when I was younger I used to do a lot of theater and I did a thing called mask class where everybody puts on a mask and for like two hours like you engage with people in a room of masks and it was amazing to me how again it transformed behavior just having that mask allowed people to feel so much more free and open with each other and VR could be like that you know it's like having the mask and suddenly like you're no longer so self-conscious because the identity that you have inside the VR experience isn't so tied to the one that has to go out and like sign that business contract and that's what you know harks back to what I was saying earlier about liberation you know the liberation inside the virtual world may be like you experience something and then you're like, well, why don't I touch people more in my real life? Or why am I not more playful? And so it allows you a simulated kind of consequence-free, and I'll put that in quotes, because we don't know yet. It might not be truly consequence-free, but it'll lick a fewer consequences that of me going into a boardroom and just trying it out in my actual life, and then failing miserably, and then losing the contract, or being humiliated, and all those things that we fear on a day-to-day basis.
[00:20:35.544] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like it could be a safe way to embody different parts of your personality through actually dressing up as the extreme polar opposite or to somehow remediate it through your actions or behaviors within virtual spaces. But yet, at the end of the day, you're able to kind of come out and it's a kind of a safe space to do that, to experiment, but also explore and discover new parts of yourself. And I'm really curious about this process of avatars and identity expression within VR and being able to walk around and look at yourself in a mirror and see what you look like and then know that as you're walking around in this space that's how people are seeing you. But yeah, that's just all sorts of different dimensions of being able to really focus on parts of your personality that you want to work on or improve on and be very intentional and deliberate of how you're expressing yourself in these environments.
[00:21:22.993] Christina Heller: That's right on the money and I feel like it's up to us, the content makers, to start to build these things and we just need the support to be able to do it because it's very technologically challenging on a lot of levels to pull this stuff off. But I have high hopes and I think we can all kind of agree that 2016 is kind of year one for VR. Would you agree with that? Would you say that 2016 is year one?
[00:21:45.150] Kent Bye: Well, it's funny because technically year one would be like 1968, you know, and so because there's been VR that's been at different levels of military and industry and enterprise, you know, since the 60s, you know, and so it's been kind of a hidden history that we don't know much about, but in terms of storytelling in VR, consumer VR, you know, we're really at this point where, you know, Gartner has these hype cycle curves where they look at When it's at the peak, you know, usually those hype cycle curves are on the order of 5 to 10 years, but for VR it's really been about 50 years, you know. So you can look at the 90s as the peak of that hype cycle, and then we've been through that trough of disillusionment, and we're kind of just getting into that part of starting to move towards that slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity. So I think of it more in that way, rather than kind of like by years, because it is a technology that goes way back and has a history of people doing stuff in VR for many, many years.
[00:22:37.989] Christina Heller: I guess what, and you're absolutely right. And honestly, as somebody who didn't care or was just too young to know about VR in the 90s, I think sometimes I can come off as a little ignorant to the people that were like there in the trenches in the 90s being like, hey, we were doing this. When I say year one VR, I think I mean of a mass consumer way. I think that things like seeing the New York Times cardboards go out, and finally the Oculus and the HTC shipping, and I'm seeing the platforms where people can monetize. I think that that's been the huge thing that's been crippling VR for a while, is that there really was just no way to make money, and so there wasn't a lot of money being poured into it. So when I say year one, I think I mean in a broad commercial sense or in a mass consumer sense, but you're right. This is a dream that is many, many decades old, and cell phones, I think, have just luckily been here to help manifest it right now.
[00:23:28.707] Kent Bye: Well, I think if you look at history and trying to delineate the birth of a technology, you can classify this time period right now as the consumer launch of it actually getting popularized and viable at a consumer scale to have VR in your homes. I think that is just qualitatively different than any other moment in time. And so from that perspective, I do think it's the origin and the birth of these immersive technologies. And, you know, you just look at, you know, augmented reality with Meta and HoloLens and, you know, Magic Leap at some point, you know. It's all this confluence of this new immersive computing platform that, to me, kind of represents this Gutenberg press of the 21st century. To me, it's like this brand new communications medium that, now that it is accessible and in people's hands, that we are going to start to see all sorts of different expressions of people's imagination, their fantasy, and to go into these imaginal worlds and to be able to have these types of interactions and conversations that were never possible before.
[00:24:29.155] Christina Heller: Totally. And, and, you know, so internally at VR Playhouse, I, I feel like a challenge for us is to decide, you know, like, okay, we have the computing power now. Like, what do we want to say? Like last year was just like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say a scramble, but it was just like building the studio, like getting the gear, like learning our workflow, like figuring out the hard way, all the things we needed to figure out. And even, you know, in the last couple of months we worked on a project, that I can't really get into, but it was, again, just like a huge technological challenge and it represented an even bigger post-production workflow that we needed to establish. And so now I'm like, all right, guys, like, what do we want to say? And I think there's definitely a lot of brilliance inside VR Playhouse that will come up with that answer. But I also am excited about, like I said, partnering with other really brilliant minds and organizations to do that too. But yeah, that's the thing. Like, OK, we've got it. We figured out how to do it. What do we want to do now?
[00:25:27.685] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:25:34.047] Christina Heller: Well, I mean, I always hope that VR will make the world a better place. I mean, I'm an optimist in that way, but I know that technology is a mixed bag. It always is. There's always a loss. You know, you gain things but you lose things. But I think what we have the opportunity to gain is a connectedness and a freedom that hasn't been experienced ever in the history of humanity. And through that freedom and connectedness, hopefully, I know it's a word that's used a lot in VR, more empathy and more personal sort of growth. I would love to see a world that looks a little more like Burning Man, where you can be how you want and you can act how you want, and there's generally a little more tolerance about that behavior. So it's interesting because I'm just thinking about this, but like, you know, everyone talks about empathy, but what are we really trying to do with the empathy? What are we trying to build? And I think tolerance is the thing I think we should be trying to build with that empathy. It's like, okay, I get it. Like you enjoy doing this thing. Like that's not really what I enjoy, but that's cool. You do you. And maybe if we don't agree, we have built better communication tools to be able to deal with whatever our issues are. So yeah, tolerance and increased communication would be what I think the really good things that could come out of VR. I could imagine, like I said, that there will be some shadow side to VR too, just like we've seen with all technology. But that's not where I put my energy and that's not what excites me about it. And I don't let the negative stuff really haunt me too much because I know what I'm in it for and what our team is in it for. And I believe like, hey, You gotta have all voices. Tech is happening, so we'd like to be a force for good.
[00:27:12.866] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just a couple thoughts that come up as you're saying that is that, first of all, VR represents the capability to be able to recreate a virtual Burning Man type of environment. And what I mean by that is that, you know, there's a lot of physical artifacts of Burning Man, but there's a lot of social interactions that are happening. And so, I just imagine the possibility of creating virtual spaces where you're able to cultivate a culture that you want to bring back into reality in some way. to not have to take the cost of all the money and time and travel that it takes to get there, but yet to create these virtual spaces where we can start to build the cultures and behaviors that we want to bring back into reality. And so that I see as a huge potential. And I've also been thinking a lot about, you know, what is it about this empathy and why is it important? Because it does come up a lot when I talk to people. Just having my own altered state experience where I came out of it realizing that I was kind of flipping between this experience of having my own reality of like no one else was really sharing the context of what I was experiencing and it was just my own fears that was coming into it and versus having a shared reality where everybody in the room was in the same place in the same context. And so, you know, we kind of walk through the world either in our own universe or we're kind of interacting with people when we are in shared realities. And a lot of what empathy does is that we're able to create this baseline of shared realities and we're really able to step into someone else's shoe to see what it is that they're going through and when we do that we can really start to share the reality with them and so the more that we do that it seems like it's connecting us in a way that we start to go beyond just our morality of ourself but starting to look at larger communities in the world and start to have behaviors that then tries to take in consideration everybody's perspective in some way. But just thinking about it in terms of you are having an experience, but you may actually be the only one in the world that is having anything that's remotely similar to that right now in this moment. Being able to have that ability to be able to empathize and share and be able to really see people I think is really powerful and VR is just the first step of the power of using that ability to step out of your own limitations of your first-person perspective and to be able to step into other perspectives in VR.
[00:29:30.540] Christina Heller: Totally I would do anything to be able to experience what it would be like to be in someone else's brain for a day And again, like I don't know how long or how we're gonna make that happen exactly in VR But like it would just be so you know, so my husband and co-founder Ian I feel like our brains work very differently, you know mine is way more practical and based in like sort of the linear reality where his is much more I feel like he's much less grounded by things like time. And so I've just always thought like it would be so interesting. I would love to experience what it would be like to be in Ian's head for an hour. And so, yeah, I think that if we can get there, like, man, I mean, it would be absolutely completely revolutionary. But that being said, I also feel like As I've traveled, you know, I was a journalist for a number of years and I met people from like all walks of life and talked to people from all walks of life and I find that we're not as dissimilar as it sometimes seems. It's just more has to do with like vulnerability and how open you are with that to other people. Like a lot of people experience the same sorts of insecurities and fears and especially like people the same age you know we kinda go through similar life struggles at certain points in our life and I think that like as much as we want to think we're like all really unique flowers you know we really do all sort of experience this human condition together and so maybe the thing would be like not showing that we're that different instead it would be like oh we're actually He's thinking the same thing I'm thinking. And isn't that funny? I never thought that somebody who was a cattle rancher in Nevada could have the same sorts of self-doubts that I feel as an investment banker in Manhattan. So we'll see. We'll see, I guess. Once we can tap in and hack into each other's consciousness, we'll finally get the answer.
[00:31:22.484] Kent Bye: I'm skeptical that, you know, our transhumanist future that we'll be able to ever do that. But yeah, just to kind of wrap things up, is there anything else that I've left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:31:32.069] Christina Heller: No, this was a much more interesting conversation than I was expecting. Normally, you know, my normal interviews are a little bit more, you know, we don't get into the sort of deeper philosophy of it all. So thank you for this. This was a good conversation. And honestly, just talking about it, like, kind of put together some connections for me that I don't know that I had put together before. So yeah, this was great. Thanks, Kent.
[00:31:52.789] Kent Bye: Yeah, me too. That was awesome. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. So that was Christina Heller. She's the CEO and co-founder of VR Playhouse, a production studio for 360 degree video. So a number of different takeaways from this interview is that first of all, just from hearing the process of what it takes to actually run a business as a production studio for 360 degree video, is that it takes a lot of different technology and just ramping up the learning curve for how to even work with this new medium. So I could just get the sense that it actually takes a lot of just going through the trenches of working with this technology because it's really still early days and there's still a lot of things that you have to come up with innovative solutions on your own because the tools and technology just aren't there yet for anybody to just come in and produce high quality 360 degree video just yet. So the other big takeaways that I got from this interview were actually from the second half of talking about, you know, bringing psychedelic consciousness into virtual reality and what that looks like and what that means. And just this concept of, is it possible to give somebody the experience of some simulated liberation so that they give a sense of what that feels like so that when they come out of virtual reality, they can more easily cultivate it within their own life. And so that seems to be an underlying thread for a lot of the deeper intentions and motivations for a lot of the creators at VR Playhouse, so I'm actually really interested to see what comes of that in their future productions. I think if you take a look at Dawn's Not Above That VR experience that they just released a few days ago, you start to see a little bit of those threads in terms of trying to give you this experience of flying through space in these different types of virtual worlds in the context of this music video. So I also get really excited about the possibilities of activating different dormant parts of our brain to be able to unlock new latent human potentials that we don't even know are possible yet. And so a lot of these threads of psychedelic consciousness and liberation and being able to lower your amount of self-consciousness through being able to explore different parts of your identities through virtual reality I think it starts to get to this underlying concept of what is reality and what is the structures of reality, and that the more that we're able to break out of our normal ideas of what the bounds of reality are within these virtual experiences, then the more that our minds are going to be opened up into being able to be fully liberated into what's possible in our lives. So I totally agree that virtual reality has that potential to be able to achieve that. What that looks like and how that actually feels I think would still yet to be seen. I think that's probably one of the biggest open questions in VR at this point. But just looking to see the different neuroplasticity principles with James Blaha's Vivid Vision and what they're able to do in terms of rewiring the brain to be able to allow people to start to see in 3D for the first time. It's just one concrete example of where these principles of neuroplasticity are starting to really take hold. So I'll be exploring some more of that specific line of thought on tomorrow's episode with Vivid Vision's Chris Miranda, who also does the Inter VR podcast, which also brings quite a psychedelic consciousness into looking at this realm of virtual reality. So the last thought that I just wanted to share is this concept of being able to hold virtual gatherings within virtual spaces to be able to cultivate the social interactions and culture that you want to see brought back into the world. So just like Burning Man is a collection of 50 to 75,000 people that that have a set of cultural norms and rules of engagement that is able to kind of create this kind of more utopian vision of what society could look like under these, you know, very contrived conditions. But the idea is that there's a lot of culture that can be cultivated and nurtured within virtual environments. So if you want to see a different world exist, then you could start to cultivate that world within virtual worlds, and then eventually make the jump from it being virtual into actually grounding it into reality. So that's a little bit what I've been starting to do with my first virtual meetup last night within AltSpace. And I hope to do more regular virtual meetups and gatherings and start to explore the social VR space a little bit more to see what's possible. So if you're interested in joining up and exploring these new realms of social VR, then head over to voicesofvr.com and go to the newsletter and events and sign up on the email. And I'll be sending out more emails for different events and locations coming up over the next two or three months. So that kind of wraps up my thoughts about VR Playhouse and Christina Heller. If you want to check out a lot of their videos, check out the post. I have some links to a lot of their productions that they've done so far. They're definitely worth checking out. And yeah, I just want to thank you for tuning in and listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do help spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a supporter to the Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
