Over the past couple of years, Dani Bittman has logged over 1800 hours in programs like Tiltbrush & Google Blocks on her way to becoming a full-time VR artist. Bittman started studying film, but realized that she had a lot to catch up with of over 100 years of cinematic history. She decided to pivot to virtual reality since the biggest thing holding her back from becoming a professional VR artist was putting in the hours to learn the tools, rapidly iterate on projects, and explore the potential of spatial storytelling. She has found a niche in creating vast landscapes in Tiltbrush that take dozens of hours to create. Over the past couple of years, Bittman has collaborated with Marvel on a Doctor Strange, helped beta test Google Blocks, created art for TheWave performances, performed at a VMWare conference, and was the lead artist on Billy Corgan’s Aeronaut music video in collaboration with Viacom NEXT.
I had a chance to talk with Bittman at Oculus Connect 4 about her journey in becoming a full-time VR artist, how she uses VR to express and reflect on her emotional states, how she’s using VR to document she dreams, and how her experiences of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in her hometown of Newtown, CT have affected what she creates and wants to experience in VR.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Here’s the Aeronaut music video in collaboration with Billy Corgan
Here’s the Scribbler Mixed Reality Video
Here’s Bittman’s visualization of Dream sequence
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So today I have a chance to talk with Danny Bittman, who is a full-time virtual reality artist. Since 2016, he spent well over 1,800 hours between different VR art programs, including Tilt Brush and Google Blocks. And so Danny talks about his journey from going from filmmaking into doing different cinematic experiences within virtual reality and combining those with unity and really kind of coming up with his own style of landscape painting. And he has been working with different artists from, you know, Viacom with Billy Corgan. He worked on a music video for them. He has been doing these live performances at different trade shows like VMware, but also just really starting to cultivate his own style within virtual reality of exploring his emotions, but also connecting to his dreams. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Danny happened on Wednesday, October 11th, 2017 at the Oculus Connect 4 conference in San Jose, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:21.612] Dani Bittman: Hi, I'm Danny Bittman, and I'm a virtual reality artist using Tilt Brush and Blocks to create immersive experiences, mostly cinematic experiences, but I'm interested in interactive ones as well. So I've done a few performances for bigger companies like Hyundai and VMware, but I don't really want to be stuck in the commercial world. I really want to create this new realm of cinematic VR.
[00:01:46.182] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could tell me a bit about your journey into becoming an immersive virtual reality artist.
[00:01:52.976] Dani Bittman: For sure. So I started as a filmmaker and I went to college for two years, but I dropped out because it wasn't really offering the types of media that I wanted to create. So I was thinking about virtual reality ever since I was in eighth grade, making AR movies and short films about going into your own mind in virtual reality. And so in 2016, I saw the HTC Vive came out and I didn't really question it. I just bought the headset and just like played with every single application I could. I tried to get into coding for a little bit, but that wasn't my jam. And then once I found Tilt Brush and started experiencing painting in virtual reality, I realized that the only thing holding people back from using this as a professional tool was time. So I went from doing five-minute Tilt Brush experiences to working in it for five hours, and then working in it in 12 hours. And that instantly was allowing me to make these large-scale experiences that people liked on social media and were sharing. So after the first month of me doing this, I was hit up by Marvel to work on an advertisement for them using Tilt Brush, which kind of just blew my mind and showed me that maybe I could make a living with this application. And it's kind of history from there because I just spent all my time doing nothing but virtual reality and painting with Tilt Brush. And starting around January, I had logged about 1,000 hours in the application. And we got a pretty good reputation on Twitter of people who just were interested in the workflows that I was creating. And so since then, I have now worked with Google on helping beta test the application and seeing how far we could push the actual exporting of the Tilt Brush creations. Yeah, I mean there's just so much that's been going on it's hard to kind of like calculate it all. I've just like been trying to share as much as I possibly can. I don't want to be secretive with the things I'm learning because the problem with filmmaking for me was that I felt like I could never learn enough and that it was a hundred years of knowledge that I had to be catching up on. And I knew the people who are like 40 are making mega films would always be better than I was. And Tilt Brush and virtual reality art to me was this medium that had no rules. And so it was super exciting to be able to discover what those rules were and work with those rules with everyone else and kind of share it with everyone.
[00:04:19.390] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I went to the first virtual reality art exhibit in Magic Gallery by Nick Ochoa, and the thing that I noticed after looking at a lot of these different artists that are out there that have taken to virtual reality as part of their primary way of creating art was that some people were creating characters and models, and I think universally across all of the different pieces there was some dimension of scale. But for your pieces, I saw that there was kind of like a landscape painting aesthetic, where you're actually creating entire worlds and environments. That scale is reaching into actually creating full-fledged environments. And so maybe you could talk about that a little bit in terms of the aesthetic, or how do you think about that? If it's a world-building thing, or how do you go from an idea to then exploration into creating these different worlds that you've been creating?
[00:05:09.188] Dani Bittman: Yes, with filmmaking, I had a bunch of crazy sci-fi ideas in my head. I would say I would want this giant cityscape with these crazy spaceships that would be flying all around you, but I didn't have a million dollars, so I couldn't actually build those sets. And so, Tilt Brush gave me the opportunity to build the sets and then go in them and start filming them from whatever angle I wanted, and gravity didn't matter. I could shoot from a bird's-eye view and we didn't need some kind of crane. And so that's the reason why I make environments. I just like living in these worlds that I'm in instead of just stepping around a simple object. As for the creation process, I try not to think about it too much. I really appreciate Jackson Pollock's workflow of just throwing things out because I really believe in the creativity of our subconscious or unconscious mind, subconscious mind, whatever. So when I first start, I put on music and I literally just let my body kind of flail and paint all around me. I see random lines, I look at it from different angles and blow those lines up to see it from massive scale. Even if they're just scribbles, it's still giving me, it's like a calibration process to feel different colors and things like that. And with Tilt Brush, you don't see the real world around you. So when you're trying to do color studies and all that, if you only have two colors in the scene, that's the only two colors that exist to you. But if you're working in Photoshop or something like that, you have the blue sky or steel walls that are around you. And so everything is kind of coloring your imagination.
[00:06:35.385] Kent Bye: Yeah, that process of you flailing around, it just reminds me of some of the performances you've been doing for these different companies where you're up on stage and you're drawing something but it's more of a performance and you're dancing and then you're also drawing or you've already drawn something and you're kind of bringing stuff into view so it's a little bit more of a live remixing of an experience that you're doing on a 2D screen because there's a challenge here because obviously it's much more compelling to see it in 3D but people are watching the 3D version of you and your embodiment, but yet they're watching what is on the screen. It has to be interesting to be seen there. So you're kind of like your head of what you're looking at becomes the camera, and you have to do these multiple kind of contexts of what you're doing as a performer, but also making sure that there's something interesting to actually look at. So maybe you could talk about this cultivation of this new form of tilt brush performance and how you even name it or talk about it or think about it.
[00:07:36.246] Dani Bittman: So I did a lot of weird dancing in college. The best way to describe it is that Tom York music video for Lotus Flower where he's just like, his arms are going crazy. It looks really, really crazy and weird to people. But once you start seeing the history of that movement, It gives it purpose. By history, I mean, if you flail your arm around while holding the trigger and tilt brush, you make some kind of line. And so even though the movement was random, there's still a product there. And so I'm really interested in this concept of, I mean, you can't really know what that history is going to look like. If you just kind of go crazy and step back, you can kind of understand motion in a deeper way that wasn't possible before. As for the process of thinking about what people are seeing, it's difficult because if it's from my perspective, it's easier. So I know people are generally seeing what my eyes are seeing. But when you're doing something like mixed reality, it gets much more difficult because you have to imagine where the camera is behind you and constantly orient yourself to the world. And so the best thing to do for that is just muscle memory. You make a scene, you take a step out of VR, then you look at what you're doing. But since we're here at Oculus Connect 4, what they just announced about the dashboard is a whole new thing for performance. Because now I can have the mixed reality view overlaid in my scene in front of me. And so I could constantly look over and see what I look like from that third-person perspective. And it's really like an out-of-body experience because it's forcing myself to not think about what I'm seeing but what everyone else is seeing.
[00:09:08.664] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just recently as well, there was Google announced Blocks, which I think is, to me, one of the really exciting new virtual reality art mediums. There was Medium, Oculus Medium, but I felt like that was, like you had to be a pretty good artist to be able to create something that looks good in Oculus Medium, and that Blocks, I felt like that was actually a good condensing down of being able to create assets that were optimized to be able to use in VR experiences, and that I could actually start to do that. Maybe talk about your experience of blocks and how you've started to incorporate blocks into your Tilt Brush workflow.
[00:09:41.125] Dani Bittman: Yeah, so the Blocks team invited me out to their office in New York back in June and they wanted to see what I could do with Blocks and how I could work it into my workflow. So I started simply just by taking random shapes like squares and bringing them into Tilt Brush and seeing what it looked like when you combine flat strokes with them. And it turns out it doesn't work beautifully. There's a lot of rendering that you have to do to make this stuff look that good. And so what I've been trying to do right now is figure out the fastest workflow to take something like blocks, bring it into Unity, and then beautify it by adding some simple coloration effects. So I really would like to start teaching those types of workflows and making it a little bit more streamlined so anyone can jump in, make something in blocks that looks very low-poly and bland, and then instantly beautify it with lights and shading and bloom and things like that. The thing with blocks is that it forces people to, like you said, simplify their art and focus on the silhouettes. And I think that's what people often forget. It's like when they go into Tilt Brush, they try to make as many strokes as possible to fill in all the spaces. But some of the best Tilt Brush pieces I've seen have been just straight lines that just kind of give you a sense of form. And so with blocks, you don't need a million polygons. Like in medium, you just need what you need. It's hard to put into words. What I've been focusing on recently is silhouettes, like not even having color in them, but literally just making 3D models and then adding light behind them to just show you what those shapes look like. And it's really hard to do something like that in Maya because it's just so abstract working on a 2D screen. Like, I struggle working with a 2D screen nowadays. I really need that 3D element.
[00:11:24.795] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like also with both Blocks and Tilt Brush, you're combining those, but you're also combining those with Unity, being able to have a little bit more interactive components, but also the lighting and being able to change that as well. I know you did a whole like 30 days of Unity and some experiments there that you were starting to explore creating an experience a day for a while there and so I'm just curious to hear that process of being able to combine the output from these different art programs in different ways and how they're able to kind of bring out different aspects in each other.
[00:11:56.823] Dani Bittman: Yeah, so I mean, Tilt Brush has the SDK, so you can drop everything in and all the shaders and everything is one-to-one, so it looks the same in Unity as it does in Tilt Brush. And it's the same thing with blocks, they now have all their shaders that go into it, and so it's really up to you to push it to the limits, you don't have to kind of make it look the same in blocks, so... Recently, what I've been doing is working with the Viacom Next team, putting together a music video and virtual reality experience that's made almost completely with Tilt Brush and Blocks assets. And that's really caused us to figure out how we can break apart these assets. Because it's one thing to make an entire world, but you can't just export out that world. Because if you want the trees moving, they have to be their own separate objects. So I've been trying to figure out ways of, like, maybe instead of populating the Tilt Brush forest with Tilt Brush trees, it might be better to make one tree and blocks and then go into Unity and multiply it all over the place. But that kind of opens up the big hole in virtual reality art right now, which is that there isn't a good placing application. And so, like, you can make your assets in Tilt, you can make them in Blocks or Medium, but then where's the VR app where you can kind of put them all together? which is what Unity is working on for their VR. I forget what the codename is for it, but it's just the ability to make VR in VR. So until they have that, I'm kind of just like struggling to like sometimes put in Intel, but then go into Unity and then I have to realign everything that was there and it's tricky.
[00:13:27.979] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like that the all-native VR workflow is coming, but it's not quite there yet with being able to create the art and assets. And the thing that's interesting to me is that now that you've spent so much time immersed in virtual reality creating things, how has that changed the way that you think or the way that you interact with the world?
[00:13:49.558] Dani Bittman: Actually, I have had a few eye troubles and I'm kind of curious about what you think about that pole behind you because that's very hard for my eyes to look at because there's so much detail there and I feel like I've gotten so used to looking at bad screens that when I see details my eyes like can't solve the 3dness So I'm a little worried about that as for my perception on the world everything seems possible now and I It's really allowed me to just be more okay with my ideas and be okay with letting go of ideas that I... It's so hard to explain because Tilt Brush has been a therapeutic tool for me. It's like if I'm like struggling and I don't understand what I'm feeling, if I go in there and just throw my arms around, eventually what I'm thinking appears in front of me. if I'm sad or something, I might suddenly create a character who's screaming. And that kind of shocks me. Like, sometimes I make something, I step away, and I think it's just like some cool, colorful piece of art, but then I realize I just, like, explained my own problems to myself. And then it makes me question, like, whether I even want to share what I just made because it's so deep and, like, to my core. But that's been the journey that I've been on, is being a little bit more vulnerable with how I'm feeling and sharing it with people. And it's been really freeing to let people know who I really am. Like my Scribbler music video I made a while back when it was my first mixed reality one where I'm going all Tom York, painting around. The way I move in that piece is so much of how I feel. I don't want to be like overly masculine or like feel weird about how I'm like holding my body. I just want to let go. And so like ever since I've released that piece, I've just been releasing anything I make. I don't hold it back.
[00:15:36.030] Kent Bye: Yeah, it sounds like that in some ways that you while you go into virtual reality you're tuning into what you're feeling and then being able to create some sort of spatial representation of that feeling and then you're immersed in that feeling and then there's this feedback loop maybe that you get more in tune with it or is it helping you understand your feelings more by doing that?
[00:15:55.959] Dani Bittman: Totally. I think when I'm in reality, I focus a lot on what my body is doing and I think a lot about how I look and everything. But when I'm in virtual reality, I'm able to just let my mind take over and not think about how high my hand is or how I'm contorting my body or anything. It's more about just like what's being outputted. and it's beautifully freeing and that's why I can be in VR for so many hours. But it makes coming out of VR very difficult, I find. I always have a period of like an hour once I come out of a piece where I can't really talk to people because it's like I have to regain the connection with my body. Which is why I am extremely excited for AR Tilt Brush or something like that where I can still create in 3D but I still have a deep connection with the world.
[00:16:43.620] Kent Bye: Like actually be in your body and maintain that sense of the presence Yeah, I wonder if like breathing or other things you could do would help with that or if you know It's just this this embodiment with virtual reality not because you don't have a body representation And I'd be curious whether or not if you actually did have a virtual body representation whether or not that would help with that grounding
[00:17:06.148] Dani Bittman: No, I don't think it will. I mean, I turn off the controllers in Tilt Brush, so I don't see the controllers. I just see a little tip where I'm painting. And I don't even like seeing the menu in my hand, which is why I love the new Quick Tool feature. I don't want to be thinking about myself. I mean, of course I kind of am, because I'm putting out my emotions. I feel like my body would just get in the way. Like, for cinematography, a lot of times what you have to do is you have to put on a lens, like a telephoto, but in order to get something in the shot with a telephoto, because it's super up close, you have to back way far away. But if you're in a small room, you're kind of blocked by that wall. So in virtual reality, you could step way far back from that wall and not see it and still get your shot. And I want to see more stuff like that in VR, where it's not recreating reality. It's using the limitedness of virtual reality. Reality is already cool. I had this idea of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy moment. where we go to an alien species planet and they're like, we've developed the ultimate virtual reality experience, like here, do you want to try it? And you go, you take the headset, you put it on and nothing is different. It's like they literally recreated everything. It's like, what do you think? And it's like, well, it's the same. Like you literally had the potential to make anything that you possibly wanted and you just made exactly what's already here.
[00:18:25.492] Kent Bye: I see. So you want to either not have your body get in the way just because aesthetically you feel like you can become more present, or you want to be able to be transported to a completely another realm.
[00:18:35.941] Dani Bittman: Right. I think with the convergence of AI and VR and everything that's coming right now, I think we are kind of hitting this transcendent moment where humans are going to be able to kind of live on another plane. And I'm not saying like, metaphysical like electrons flying around or something but it's like our minds can move through space in a different way now and I think our forms in the metaverse can be vastly different than what they are now and we should be using this time to figure that out rather than just being stuck with the body's limitations.
[00:19:10.146] Kent Bye: So when are we getting layers in Tilt Brush?
[00:19:14.471] Dani Bittman: Oh, I don't know. They haven't told me that. But it's definitely something that I want, because on the Viacom project I'm working on right now, I have to constantly delete everything, export out this tree, then reload the scene, delete the tree, then export out everything. It's a pain.
[00:19:31.067] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like that's the biggest thing. From what I understand, they didn't design with the grouping from the ground up, and so I guess there's a little bit of a re-architecture that they've had to do.
[00:19:40.568] Dani Bittman: I will say, though, that I like the pace they're moving at. I'm not a huge fan of Quill. I don't like the UI. I think it's a lot to take on for new users. And the file system is very, very confusing, trying to group things together and having different layers. And then you have the whole thing of, if you draw on one layer, and then you realize you wanted it to be on layer 10 and not layer 7, then everything gets all mix matched. And people will give up because the complexity is too much for them. And there's a certain beauty to being able to go into Tilt Brush and drawing everything on one layer. And I think it just makes it easier for new users to get in. Because that's my biggest fear with Tilt Brush, is that after about five years, it's going to be way too complex, and new users won't know how to get into it. And I think the simpler we can make it for people to have that feeling of, wow, I can create anything in here, the better.
[00:20:32.146] Kent Bye: I think Blocks actually does a great job of being able to group things together by just drawing and highlighting and clicking the menu button. And that seems like a good model as a good stopgap to at least have that pseudo-layer functionality, but to be able to not have to move everything individually, but to be able to kind of move things around at least.
[00:20:50.796] Dani Bittman: And you can do that in Tilt Brush actually now. We're not grouping, but you can select things, rescale them, and change their positions. I guess my point is that I don't think it should be essential to have a layer tool to make something in Tilt Brush. I remember the early days when there was no scaling feature, and we had to literally jump around. And if you wanted to get something really high up, like if you were drawing an elephant to scale, you had to get on a chair and reach for the ceiling, maybe move your base stations a little bit. And there's something fun to that.
[00:21:21.703] Kent Bye: So what do you want to experience in VR?
[00:21:26.787] Dani Bittman: I want people to be a little bit more willing to create dreams for VR. Because VR is more closer to the dreams we have at night than it is to reality, as I was kind of saying before. And so I want people to get a little bit more abstract with what they're saying. Like if they're trying to make you feel small in a certain situation, then have a giant room around you that like melts down and then suddenly you're falling into a grave or something, but then you start lifting back up and the grave was never there. It's just a plot of grass and it doesn't really make sense, but there's still a feeling that is conveyed there. And those types of stories don't have a character backstory. And every VR experience I've gone into so far, like a video game that has a long character story or something, it's hard for me to embody that character because I don't really associate with everything that they're feeling. But if your visuals are a bit more abstract, then people can kind of fill themselves in more. It should be about the person going into the experience. It shouldn't be about some character that the writers wrote up.
[00:22:33.832] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:22:48.047] Dani Bittman: I'm from Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and after the shooting in my town, it was really hard for us to not convey the sadness we were feeling after the shooting there, but to convey the sudden love that we felt for everyone and this urgency to treat everyone with respect and show everyone these random acts of kindness. And so I know everyone talks about VR as an empathy machine, and I don't think it's really about that. I think it's more of like a vehicle to make you realize the things that you put off in your life. I want people to lift off their headset and be like, yeah, I love my mom. Or like, yeah, I love my dad. And just like acknowledge the things that they usually, I don't know. It's a hard topic.
[00:23:44.076] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, there's been a lot of in the news just a week ago or so with the whole massacre that happened in Las Vegas. And I know I saw a tweet from you. I think even before that, going into Akla's home and just seeing gun violence, there's a lot of video games that the easiest thing to do is to vanquish the enemies. And I think that what you're saying there is there's a thread there of just being connected to people and that connection to your family, but also that love.
[00:24:19.154] Dani Bittman: Yeah. When we had TV, when TV came out and when radio came out and all those the old mediums came out, it gave us this ability to convey philosophy in a way that was impossible before. I'm sorry. I don't know why this is hitting me right now.
[00:24:45.217] Kent Bye: What are you feeling?
[00:24:47.761] Dani Bittman: It's just like it's so it's obnoxious to see how I mean like at this conference the the it was so much about shooters and I just feel like it's so weird that we focus so much on using a weapon to constantly just like kill people and get like points from it and stuff like that like I get it but I can't believe that we're still doing that like 17 years since 2000 or whatever and it's just been so overdone and I'm like starting to worry that it's populating people's minds a little bit too much and not that it's causing people to go and like commit a shooting or something but it's it's making them a little bit desensitized to it and they forget about the people who are affected and not just family members of those who died but those who are in the same town. I'm sure a lot of business people have visited Mandalay Bay where the Las Vegas shooting just happened and for them to hear that that safe place was suddenly destroyed must really hurt those people and I think
[00:25:55.828] Kent Bye: We forget about that and this kind of media can kind of make us feel for everyone Yeah, the thing that really comes up as you're saying all this is just that there's so much trauma in our world and These tragedies that happen they're a news item for a day or two and the news cycle just moves on and But what are the deeper rituals that we have as a society to be able to really deal with these traumas that we have? And that we've kind of become numb to it. And I think that what I hear you saying is just that immersing ourselves in either violence within video games or violence in the context of movies, it kind of just permeates our culture. And to me, I see virtual reality as a medium that's much more receptive. It's much more about receiving an environment rather than Vanquishing an enemy and I feel like we're looking at the previous mediums of things that were easy to do within Video games and kind of replicating that but I agree. That's not really all that necessarily compelling for me I don't I don't spend a lot of my time in wave shooters and virtual reality and I think that I'm much more interested and how do you give people these new modes of expression or new modes of being able to heal from the traumas of our society and
[00:27:19.329] Dani Bittman: The one thing that I've learned from the Sandy Hook shooting is that we try to be an adult. We have this idea of what being an adult is. And we kind of saw after that that it's like those kids didn't get to live their lives. And I've kind of felt this big need to live my life as if I am a kid and to kind of like help them live for it. It's like you have to be grateful for the life that we have. And so I want to help people see the world through that lens again and understand what it's like to be a kid and how shooters shouldn't be something that are praised. It's something that we should be getting rid of in our society. I really think by allowing someone to be awake in a dream, it might make them realize that more. And if they can be lucid in reality, in that kind of virtual reality dream, then maybe when they go to bed that night, they'll wake up more and they'll be a little bit more conscious about suppressed feelings or something that they have going on and then over time be a little bit more open with themselves and be willing to express themselves in ways that they originally repressed, which is the journey that I've been going on as I was talking about before.
[00:28:33.214] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm really seeing a lot of this technology as being a mirror for ourselves, and that as we create these really violent games, and I suspect that as people go into them, the gamers, I think, may be desensitized enough that they'll enjoy that, but I think that a lot of people may be a little bit horrified with some of these really gory games that have been coming out. You know, Killing Floor Incursions is a game that just pops in my mind, is a game that I did at GDC, which was just, like, extremely bloody and gory and I'm a journalist and so I'm playing these games but they stick with me and it's like that that thing that sticks with me that that becomes a little bit disturbing and the other thing and I just comment being here at Oculus Connect 4 is there a little bit of a disconnect there at Facebook and that The thing that happened just a couple of days before Oculus Connect 4 is that there was this tragedy that happened in Puerto Rico and just devastated the entire country. And in order to promote Facebook Spaces, they took these 360 videos of Puerto Rico with these avatars that were cartoons. and they weren't emotionally present. They were smiling. They were cartoons. They had no ability to actually show the depth of grief that was happening in there. And they turned it into a product placement for virtual reality where they were high-fiving while they're in Puerto Rico. And the level of tone deafness that that shows me, it makes me super worried about the future of virtual reality when Facebook is so disconnected from what the hell they're doing. You know, we're going to create an optimistic future, we're going to create a reality that's better than our reality, but yet what they're doing is that they're just creating a mirror of how disconnected and inauthentic they are. It's like they've literally created an embodiment of how inauthentic they are by having cartoons high-fiving each other in Puerto Rico after a disaster and doing a product placement. It's just like... I see so much power about virtual reality and I see that and it is just embarrassing to see that because it shows me the degree to which that they are disconnected from the real depths of the emotional realities of the world.
[00:30:51.026] Dani Bittman: And that content that they created is in line with, I think, an old perspective of creating empathy, which is that if you capture a world in 360, and then you stand there, you feel more like you're there, and you'll understand the grief that those people are going through. And I just don't necessarily think that's true. I think it gives you a good sense of scale and perspective, and you might understand the way things look there, but that doesn't convey the emotion of what's going on there. It's like wearing the tragedy as wallpaper because Faceless is not really about what's happening around you. It's about playing with coloring tools and seeing your avatars and taking pictures of each other. So it just doesn't really feel right to use that as a vehicle to see what's going on because if you really want to understand the Puerto Rico disaster through that 360 video, you should have nothing in that scene but that 360 video. And you aren't actually there, so I don't know why you should see your own avatar either. It should be about passively viewing it around you. And yeah, I don't like how they use that for their advertising or how you can open up Oculus Home and then you see Gun Club there. What would those people from Puerto Rico or who have gone through shootings feel when they see content like that? And I think that's a lot of things we forget. And the whole concept of too soon is the problem with this, I think. Because if someone hasn't been around a fire in a really long time, they can make jokes about being in a fire. But if their family house just burned down, like is what's happening right now in Napa, Then next time they see fire or a fire reference or maybe like an animation of someone running around with like flames on them It's gonna strike them. They may even like break down because like it's so close to them and so People just have to be a little bit more considerate about the deep Emotions that everyone else has around them about situations that they haven't been in There's no such thing as too soon because everyone is going through some kind of tragedy like that
[00:32:51.007] Kent Bye: And finally, is there anything else left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:32:55.410] Dani Bittman: I think, in general, all of us creators should continue to stay open about what we're doing and how we're achieving everything we're doing, and to not worry so much about competition, because you hear all these divides about the different corporations of Vive and Octus kind of fighting each other, yet if you look down on the community level, we're all trying to help each other out doing what we do. virtual reality artist community is very small right now but we all like have each other's back and if someone has a performance and they don't know what rate to set like we'll like kind of talk it out with that person or if like if we have a job we'll hand it off to someone else just because we think they need that job not necessarily that because we can't take it and I'm worried that as the virtual reality industry expands we're going to forget that and become a little bit too splintered. And so in everything I'm doing moving forward, I'm trying to be 100% transparent. This big four-month-long project that I'm about to embark on, an independent project to convey basically everything we've been talking about, I'm sharing weekly updates about workflows I'm creating. And so technically someone could recreate my whole project by the time I release it, but I don't care. I really don't care. I just want to help everyone else get to the point that I'm at now because of how emotionally freeing it's been for me. It's completely changed my life.
[00:34:17.614] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:34:19.475] Dani Bittman: Thank you.
[00:34:21.016] Kent Bye: So that was Danny Bittman, and he's a virtual reality artist who's logged well over 1,800 hours between Tilt Brush and Google Blocks. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I think that Danny is starting to develop his own style within virtual reality that is based upon creating these vast landscapes. Like he said, something that he thought was going to differentiate himself from other VR artists was to just spend a lot of time working on one piece, which allowed him to really expand out the scale of the experiences. And so because he's been working with Unity as well, he's been able to add another layer of visual effects that can allow his experiences be translated into 2D that just look absolutely beautiful. There's only so far you can go with using, you know, both Tilt Brush and Google blocks. But when you add them within Unity and add all sorts of different effects, then he's able to get a whole other mood and feeling out of that. And also just add a layer of dynamic movement into his experiences. And so during this interview, it hadn't been released yet, but he had been working on this music video with Billy Corgan called Aeronaut. And it's a beautiful music video that has a lot of movement that's kind of correlated to the emotions of the music. And that's what Danny said that he's really been focusing on lately, is just being able to focus in on an emotion, an experience that he's having, and then express that within his VR art piece, within Tilt Brush. And so he's spatially representing his emotions within these virtual reality art programs. he's really starting to take that into his dream world where he's able to have a new layer of almost lucid awareness within his dreams, but to take those dreams and then to paint them within virtuality and to further reflect upon the deeper emotional dynamics of his life. And the fact that Danny grew up in Newtown and that there was this horrible massacre that happened there on December 14, 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. I can really see how that has colored the way that he's approaching virtuality as a medium. The thing that he saw after that was the amount of love and connection that people had with each other and to each other. And I think that's the spirit and the energy that I think Danny's trying to bring throughout his work, is to try to get into this layer of emotional vulnerability, but to really connect to other people. being able to go into your dream life and be able to share your dreams, I think is probably one of the most intimate things you could possibly do. And that's something that Danny is really interested in exploring. And the other thing that he was talking about is just the way that he's able to get into this trance state of dancing, where he's able to pull down the trigger and move his hands through space, and he's able to take a step back and understand the motion in a new way. And so he's capturing his embodiment and stepping back and having a chance to look at it. And this is yet another way of moving through space and expressing your emotions through your embodiment. And he's able to reflect on it in a new way and be able to understand his movements. And as he paints, he's able to understand what's happening inside of himself. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a donor. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon your gracious donations to continue to bring you this coverage. So if you like this coverage, then become a member and donate today. Donating at the $5 amount is a perfect place to be able to help sustain this podcast. So you can donate today at patreon.com slash Voices in VR. Thanks for listening.
