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Would you watch a virtual-reality Casablanca?
The question is ridiculous, but usefully so. VR will never be like the movies, culturally or aesthetically, and the best way to understand why may be to imagine you're experiencing the 1942 Warner Brothers classic not as a linear story viewed from a theater seat, but as an immersive world accessed by a digital headset.
Most of us would never leave Rick's Café Américain. We'd go behind the bar with Sascha, hover by Emil the croupier at the roulette table, hang out with Sam as he played "As Time Goes By" again. Me, I'd be following Peter Lorre's sniveling Ugarte. But the central drama of Rick's rekindled love and sacrifice for Ilsa Lund? We'd probably never get that far. Director Michael Curtiz and the Warner Brothers elves did such a brilliant job imagining the world of Casablanca that we'd be content to explore it until we bumped up against the walls, like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.
[...] VR will never become the new cinema. Instead, it will be a different thing. But what is that thing? And will audiences trained in passive linear narrative—where scene follows scene like beads on a string, and the string always pulls us forward—appreciate what the thing might be? Or will we only recognize it when the new medium has reached a certain maturity, the way audiences in 1903 sat up at The Great Train Robbery and recognized that, finally, here was a movie?
Movie critic Ty Burr goes on to review and discuss several VR productions and how they succeed or fail at using the new potential of virtual reality.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday February 19 2017, @03:22PM
The easy answer would be to say that the audience member's position within the VR scene would be static, and the only thing they could do would be to look around the scene. For example, when watching that latest action/comedy about the mismatched White and Black man drawn together to investigate a murder you can look forward to see them arguing, then look up and to the left after hearing the explosion to see that bomb go off on the 50th floor of a distant building.
However, that would require too much money to do, and since Hollywood has been churning out nothing but bullshit for the past 20-30 years and the PC trend is killing the "oomph" of movies, the best you're gonna get is what I described above but for a CGI movie. Let's hope a studio will have the balls to make one of those with niggers and tits. And maybe even nigger-tits.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19 2017, @03:34PM
How about more like those Scandinavian detectives, where you walk along with the murder scene, notice that one important thing in the grass before the detectives do... something along those lines (extra hints that the detectives don't notice, but might give you a lead on the murderer).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19 2017, @07:50PM
You are a very unimaginative and ill informed person..
It will be many things (unless it fails) and I think this is obvious to anyone with an IQ over 100.
Certain types of "story" games like "The Walking Dead" and others have already shown us what the interactive movie experience will tend towards. Games like Warcraft have shown us what interactive worlds will be like. These will progress as time goes on.
On the movie side have been the standard 3D movie experiences and the "pick your camera angle" movies. Visual environments combined with hydraulic space ship, air-plane simulators and fairground rides are also part of the spectrum.
The combination of movie with user interaction has already been underway and will continue in various forms. There will not be one solution.
And all the above without even referring to the infant VR solutions available right now with their peripherals, motion tracking, VR paint apps, weapons, etc, etc
I have been watching unimaginative fools comment on VR for a few years now and I must say it is always amusing. Whether it will be successful overall in the long term and not just a niche product will come down to price, market share, tech limitations, etc (as with ANY technology); but not due to lack of conceptual potential!
Also: you drunk, racist pig-man.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Sunday February 19 2017, @08:56PM
Games like Warcraft have shown us what interactive worlds will be like.
No, games like World of Warcraft have shown us what padded playgrounds will be like. EVE Online shows us what interactive worlds will be like: just like this one. Did that just happen? Yeah, it did.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday February 19 2017, @09:21PM
Sod-off, you faggot-fuck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @04:46AM
lol.
Sticks and stones will break my bones, but you will still be the same, sad loser you have always been.
Sorry, there is no cure and its terminal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @09:38AM
Indeed, my first thought when reading this was: Don't look at movies, look at games. Games already do non-linear, interactive story telling.
But that is not the only place to look at: As with all new technologies, one place to look at is Science Fiction. In particular, the Star Trek holodeck is the perfected version of a VR environment. And its entertainment use is mostly role-playing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @07:09AM
You almost made it through an entire comment!!
Personally I've been hearing from older generations how media is way more offensive than ever. PC killing Hollywood? Lol more lime "waaah they don't pump out as much racist shit that makes me feel better about myself as they used to!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @08:54AM
I'm reminded of Police Quest and then almost any open world game since then (right up to the VR Star Wars game i played a couple of months ago) where I travel endlessly through a mute universe until I eventually accidentally trigger the event that progresses the stupid story. Open world my ass. All I've learned in the last 25 years of open world gaming is the all of the activity in the known universe only exists on some committee designed plot line, and that the out-of-the box thinking that rewards me handsomely in real life turns open world games a nightmarish hell that makes me yearn for a side scroller or FPS. Pivoting in a scene has got to be the limit for cinema, surely, after that its a single threaded plot in a vast open desert.