For two years, the BBC VR Hub was producing VR content to test out the potential for immersive technologies to help fulfill the BBC’s mission to inform, educate, and entertain the public. The BBC was able to produce at least 10 projects with half of them debuting at major festivals including 1943 Berlin Blitz and Make Noise at Venice 2018, Nothing to Be Written at SXSW 2019, Dr Who: The Runaway at Tribeca 2019, and Doctor Who: The Edge Of Time at Venice 2019. The BBC recently summarized their lessons learned & production tips within a 64-page pamphlet titled “Making VR a Reality: Storytelling & Audience Insights 2019 (PDF).”
Zillah Watson was the Commissioning Editor for Virtual Reality for the BBC VR Hub, and I’ve seen her a lot on the festival circuit this past year with new projects at each of them. I had a chance to catch up with her at the IDFA DocLab where we talked about what makes a great VR story including: “the experience heightens presence, there is an emotional charge, the story is spatial, the viewer is more than a spectator, there’s a taste of the impossible, it invites meaningful interactions, go beyond the visual.”
Watson also talked about how the BBC collaborated with 160 different libraries around the UK by setting them up with VR equipment, and showing a number of their pieces of premium immersive storytelling content that they produced over that past couple of years. They recently published a blog post containing some of the survey results from over 1200 people, and they found “96% told us they found the experience enjoyable; 92% wanted to try more VR and also said they would talk about their experience to other people; 70% were inspired to learn more about the subject they’d seen.”
It wasn’t the technology that was drawing them in, but rather the storytelling content that made them feel compelled to share their experiences with others. They also found that showing VR at libraries had shifted their perspective of what libraries could be. They started to regard them “more as community hubs rather than quiet places for study, a place for trialing new tech, and generally future thinking rather than old fashioned.”
The consumer market for VR is still ramping up, and so the BBC VR Hub is taking a pause from operating at full capacity. But Watson said that the BBC is going to continue to experiment with creating immersive content in co-production with ARTE and Atlas V, and hopefully they’ll continue to provide new premium VR content to the libraries around the UK as a form of adhoc LBE distribution. Based upon what we’ve seen from the BBC over the last couple of years, then I’m sure that we’ll be seeing them again as the distribution channels continue and market adoption of VR headsets continues to grow. But in the meantime, be sure to check out their very useful “Making VR a Reality: Storytelling & Audience Insights 2019 (PDF)” pamphlet that summarized their lessons learned over the past couple of years.
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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 continuing on in my series of looking at some of the narrative innovations that were coming out of the IDFA DocLab, today's conversation is with the BBC's Zilla Watson. So for the last two years, Zilla has been running the BBC's VR Hub, which had this mandate to be able to explore VR's potential to be able to fulfill the BBC's mission, which is to inform, educate and entertain. So what they've been doing is they basically created a whole wide range of different content. In fact, in the film festival circuit, I've been running into Zilla at almost every of the major VR conferences that I've seen. At South by Southwest, they were showing nothing to be written. At Tribeca, they were showing a Doctor Who, The Runaway. And then at Venice, they were showing another Doctor Who escape room type of experience called The Edge of Time. they've produced at least 10 different experiences and then did a number of different things. Like they took these experiences to libraries and they did all sorts of surveys and just trying to see what the reaction to the public was of VR. And they found that overwhelmingly positive results. And it's kind of a research project that they did. And so at the end of it, they produced this whole document called BBC Virtual Reality, Making VR Reality. It's a storytelling and audience insights of 2019. It's a whole pamphlet that They print it out and we're handing out at the doc lab. But they also, it's a PDF online, I'll link to it in the show notes here that you can check it out. They're trying to distill down a lot of the lessons of immersive storytelling down into this document to spread out into the wider community. And some of their lessons learned in terms of producing and distributing and some of the fundamental immersive storytelling insights that come from their experiments within virtual reality. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Zilla happened on Sunday, November 24th, 2019 at the IFFA Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:03.755] Zillah Watson: I'm Zilla Watson and I, for the last two years, ran the BBC's VR Hub, where we had a remit to explore how virtual reality might perform what the BBC's mission has always been since it was formed in 1922, which was inform, educate and entertain audiences. So before I took the job at the VR Hub, I'd worked in BBC R&D with Oscar Rabie on an amazing VR project called The Turning Forest, which really explored how we could use immersive interactive sound in virtual reality and I created a lot of early virtual reality news with BBC News but by the time we set up the VR Hub we'd done some pretty good audience research and we realised there were some problems with virtual reality in terms of that it was going to take a while for audiences to take off, that it didn't really work yet in the home. And there were lots of challenges, but one of the challenges was also that there wasn't enough really strong content that would engage audiences sufficiently to put up with the problems with the headsets and the other things that were associated with it. So that was our focus, was a very content-focused approach, but through that to understand audiences, business models for VR, and the distribution of VR.
[00:03:15.400] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you've had a busy year because going to a lot of these festivals, whether it's Tribeca, South by Southwest, or Venice, you've had projects in a lot of these different places with new projects or just really experimenting and really iterating and putting out lots of different projects over the last couple of years. And so you've just put out this BBC virtual reality, making VR reality, so you're kind of trying to distill all the storytelling and audience insights. So maybe you could tell me about this process of putting this together and what were some of your major takeaways from that?
[00:03:46.553] Zillah Watson: Well, we thought as a team we really should share what we'd learned and understood so far about storytelling. And it's a sort of little mark on the history of VR. This is where we got to in 2019. But we have combined it with lots of audience research and our most interesting research has come from a big project we did this summer where we took virtual reality into over 160 public libraries in the UK. It was supposed to be about 50 and it just got bigger and bigger. And through that we had some really extraordinarily positive quantitative research from questionnaires, but we also did a qualitative survey where people were phoned about two months after they'd seen the VR to test its memorability because as a media organization, key to us was, does VR stay in people's heads longer than just watching a film or reading an article? Is there something special that will make them more interested and engaged with the subject? And we really do think that is true. People who watched our series about the Congo I mean, quite a serious three-part series. It's engaging and beautiful as well, but it's about serious issues about a country that is going through extremely troubled times. 70% of people who watched that said they were more interested in African issues, which is just fantastic.
[00:05:00.318] Kent Bye: So has this been translated into even more money or initiative to continue this? Because I know that VR is in this precarious position where it's still growing, still getting out there. So it's not like everybody has VR headsets. But it seems like that you're still interested in the potential and then figuring out a way how to scale that out, whether it's working with libraries or whatever it ends up being. But do you have a sense of whether or not there's going to be continued exploration and expansion of these immersive technologies and the potential for storytelling?
[00:05:29.705] Zillah Watson: Well our work as a team is done, we've explored across different genres and shown the potential for audiences but we feel like the market does need to mature a little bit before it can be a mass audience experience. Meanwhile the BBC is continuing to support projects in libraries across the UK over the next year and there'll be our last project which is a co-production with Arte and Atlas V will also go into libraries. So we're pausing on the content commissioning front because in a way we need, we've shown that we can make really outstanding content that can inform, educate and entertain audiences now, but we need a lot of other things to just mature and catch up a bit before we can really exploit that. So it's a pause, meanwhile our research and development engineering department will also continue to be running experiments around virtual reality but also associated technologies like 5G so that we really understand when the right moment is to do more of this.
[00:06:25.387] Kent Bye: Well in this book you have a whole section on what the storytelling insights are for virtual reality and so I'm just curious if you, either I can find it or if you remember, let's see.
[00:06:37.143] Zillah Watson: Again, trying to reduce this to a few statements is very, very difficult. And I would hate to describe these in any way as rules in filmmaking and storytelling are always there to be broken. But we wanted to express to people, especially from other industries, for example, TV and film commissioners, how when they're presented with a virtual reality idea, what sort of questions should they be asking about? What will make a story work really well in a headset? And again, backed up by our audience research, If you're trying to convey complex arguments, lots of facts and figures, probably not. When VR is at its strongest, it's giving you a sense of being there. So, for example, in just the 360 films that were made for the Congo VR series, people remember standing in Kinshasa Station, and I think that's the route to its power. Just as when you go on holiday somewhere and you see what it's like for yourself, you become more interested in a country afterwards. VR's having that same impact. In terms of the interactive pieces, Nothing To Be Written, which is a beautiful music, art, documentary piece, taking you back to the First World War. Again, you're standing in a trench, in a hallway, waiting for the letter to come home from the soldier, in a hospital. That sense of being in those places, again, enhances your feeling of what it must have been like to live there. So, it's a strong emotional story.
[00:07:57.470] Kent Bye: And so what were some of the other big points of what makes a great VR story?
[00:08:01.373] Zillah Watson: Well, we've said very much there has to be a spatial element, that being there and seeing the space, understanding the scale of it is helping you to understand that situation or story. Our mantra for VR commissioning has always been if you can tell the story better in a film for TV, don't even consider VR. So we've been specifically looking at things that offer a new dimension of wonder through the VR headset, whether it's the understanding of scale, or doing something in an interactive way that you couldn't possibly do on a television. So in our Doctor Who immersive drama you drive the TARDIS with the sonic screwdriver. You couldn't do that on TV and it's fun and it's very exciting. But with the pieces we've done we've been very careful about the interaction we've introduced has to be meaningful. We've been going, we've had relatively low budgets so we haven't had the sort of huge amounts of audience testing that you could do if you were doing the sort of level of interactivity on a game. So we've stuck to keeping the story strong, keeping the drama strong, and sometimes we found that too much interactivity can interfere with the emotional impact of that drama. So we've kept it simple and meaningful when it's there.
[00:09:07.610] Kent Bye: And so for you, what's next now that this remit has stopped, then now what? What are you doing now in terms of this whole space?
[00:09:15.641] Zillah Watson: Well, I'm thinking about where I want to take it next. So I'm going to start a whole new lot of thinking about the vision we need to have for where virtual reality is going to take our society. And I think we need to, again, think about healthcare. about how it can be used in education and come up with a vision about how virtual reality and other forms of technology can make our society a better place. Entertainment will have its place in that, but I think it's really important to look holistically about where the technology can take us.
[00:09:46.539] Kent Bye: Is there anything that you want to experience in VR?
[00:09:51.052] Zillah Watson: I love being taken to places I could never otherwise go in VR, so anything that enables me to explore places I wouldn't otherwise be able to see will always work for me.
[00:10:01.335] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive technologies and immersive storytelling might be, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:10:09.945] Zillah Watson: Well I think we've gone far enough with our research to really feel that potential is huge in terms of opening people's minds to different worlds, helping them to understand how other people live and giving them extraordinary experiences. So we just need to wait for other aspects of the industry to mature to ensure that the wonderful experiences I'm able to try here at IDFA can be appreciated by audiences in their home, in their local library, in their schools around the world.
[00:10:40.288] Kent Bye: Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:10:44.212] Zillah Watson: Keep on in there. We've moved so far in the last five years. It is absolutely extraordinary the progress that's been made in terms of both the technology and the storytelling. We need to solve distribution problems and other things, but if we keep on moving at this pace, it won't be that long.
[00:11:01.524] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. So that was Zilla Watson for the last two years. She's been running the BBC's VR Hub, which had this mandate to be able to explore the potential for VR to be able to inform, educate and entertain. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, one of the big findings that they found is that, you know, when they put this VR content and seeded it out into over 160 different libraries all across the United Kingdom, is that they had overwhelming positive results. And that it's not just like the technology that people were interested in that just released a blog post here on December 4th is called getting VR to mainstream audiences what we learned from our partnership with local libraries and they have a video there where They're talking about how it was not the VR headset that people want to see it was actually like really compelling content They spent a lot of time over the last year trying to create really high-level storytelling experiences that ended up at a lot of the different film festivals and I think that's a testament that you know, they were actually trying to push forward the medium of storytelling and do these different narrative explorations. And so starting back in like 2017, they had a number of different experiences that were out there. But really in 2018 and 19, they really were showing out like the 1949 Berlin Blitz showed at Venice, as well as make noise also showed at Venice. Nothing to be written premiered at South by Southwest in 2019 and then Doctor Who narrative experience where you get to fly the TARDIS happened at Tribeca 2019 and then there's another kind of escape room game that they showed at Venice called Doctor Who the edge of time and then other 360 videos and other experiments with like Damien the Nile and Congo people just do nothing crossing the sky missing pictures and Adam to orbit and So the content that they had was just actually really super compelling and, you know, really trying to push the medium of virtual reality forward and to see what the unique affordances were with the medium of virtual reality. And so they came up with a number of takeaways that they published in this booklet. It was called BBC Virtual Reality, Making VR Reality. If you Google that, you should be able to come up, but also put a link to the PDF if you want to get a direct link to it. So some of the big takeaways is that the experience heightens a sense of presence, that there is a deep emotional charge when you go into a virtual reality experience, that the stories that tend to work better are ones that have a spatial component, so that you actually feel like that you're there, that the viewer is more than just a spectator, so they're able to actually engage within the story in some way. But in some ways, you have to have meaningful interactions, and they found that if you had too much interactions that, you know, in order to control the narrative tension sometimes, the story that was being transmitted sometimes interactions are in conflict with that so they had to kind of find the balance between that but when they did do interactions that the interactions needed to be meaningful in some way needed to go beyond just showing visual things and then having some sort of taste of the impossible so things that you'd never be able to do whether that's you know stepping into the TARDIS and being able to drive it or to take you to places that are just not very feasible to go to. And after they did their study, they found that, you know, they surveyed over 1,200 people, and they found that 96% of the people told them that they found the experience enjoyable, and that 92% of them wanted to try more VR, and they said that they would tell other people about the experience. In the video, there's a librarian who's saying that there's these teenagers who are watching these different experiences in the library and that they were texting their friends. And she was like, when was the last time that you had teenagers texting their friends to come hang out at the library? And they saw that part of the dynamic of doing these collaborations with the library was that it started to transform what the library was into a place that you'd be quiet and go study, turning it into more of these centers for hubs for people to come and hang out and have a community hub. And talking to other people about, you know, how libraries are shifting the roles of, you know, trying to come these interdisciplinary melting pots to be able to, like, help train people up or to have different community events. That's also a trend that I saw. And I've also done other interviews at Akwesasne Connect 6 with a woman who works within an indigenous community and using virtual reality to actually capture different elements of oral traditions and rituals that are happening within that community and to have a way to transmit knowledge from the elder generation into the next generation, even if they're not ready to receive it now, at least to capture and archive it so that they can come back later and have it a part of that library. And so starting to see how the libraries are actually starting to help document different aspects of cultural rituals that are happening and seeing how virtual reality could be a medium to be able to help preserve a lot of that cultural heritage. So that was exciting for me to see, but also just to see that as they were doing these different research, they did in-depth research and found that people remembered things. They said 70% of them were inspired to learn more about the subject that they had just seen. And then they could have like a deep memory of that later. So actually giving you the sense of being there is able to induce this sense of context. And that larger context can just give you a larger framework to be able to, you know, with your memory, be able to understand. different dynamics of the situation. So going into the Congo and Africa, people just being more open-minded to learning more about Africa. So I'm super excited to see that this is something that they did at the BBC. A little, I guess, disappointed that it stopped just because, you know, it's just more of a pragmatic thing where the distribution of a lot of these headsets aren't at a point where it makes sense for them to continue to do things at the mass scale. They're going to continue to experiment and innovate when it comes to storytelling, maybe continue to have things at these different film festivals, I'd love to, you know, see more projects and see how that they continue to, you know, push it forward and then have the distribution mechanism potentially into the libraries, that could be one mode. But just like they're doing this collaboration with our day. So I did this interview with Kai messenberg, just to see like what art is doing an amazing different amount of innovation and production within virtual reality. And so doing these co-productions with the BBC and Atlas 5 to be able to potentially create specific content that could be distributed out potentially to these libraries, compile it down into 360 video using the Oculus Go, or finding other ways to kind of get it out into the different communities. They didn't talk much about like location-based entertainment. I think, you know, with their remit to be able to inform, educate, and entertain, they're looking at the existing distribution mediums that are out there. And because virtuality is still so nascent, they're not necessarily like still continuing on operating at full speed, but it was a brief research project to be able to like prove out that, you know, there's certainly a lot of compelling potential here. And, you know, as I continue to go to these different film festivals and see what type of content that's out there, there's certainly a demand for stuff, especially when there's like hot experiences that not a lot of people can get to see, they will sell out very quickly. So just to see that there's going to be other options to be able to get this content out for people to be able to actually see it. it. So excited to see where this goes. If you want to check it out, definitely check out the BBC virtual reality making VR reality. It's a great little pamphlet, lots of different tips for folks to either if you're a commissioner looking to see how to translate a story and what would make sense, or looking at some more logistics of production, great little distillation of all their lessons learned over the last couple of years. 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 member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from listeners like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
