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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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday February 19 2017, @05:58PM
constructing a fixed point of view experience
To summarize my post from below, depending on the quality of the plot and the financial level of the backers you'll get some number of "multiple" instead of "a".
Then home viewers pick random perspective or pick one and watch the whole thing or random scene shifts to fill a predetermined amount of time or marathon it for 30 total hours of footage.
KSR Mars Trilogy filmed from the perspective of each of the original hundred colonists.
Insert any generic military action battle flick. Well, not the guy that dies 5 minutes in, probably. Some classic 50s and 60s WWII navy movies could be remade into "pick your captain and watch the fight from his perspective".
There exist sports movies, putting 40 cameras on 40 helmets is merely expensive, a mere linear scaling of 1 camera on 1 helmet. On the other hand something like Ninja Warrior isn't going to make much sense from multi-POV. On the other hand it would be revolutionary for something like the Olympics to allow anyone other than ticket holders to decide what they wanted to watch at any given instant. Imagine a football game where you can shut off the dumb sportscaster guy and the idiotic human interest stories and watch the entire game from the perspective of your favorite wide receiver or QB.
Realty TV in the "eliminate one per episode" genre would work extremely well. There would be a hell of a lot more camera and sound crews wandering around good luck with the editing.
PoV Pr0n obviously.
I distantly remember a Trek TNG or maybe DS9 episode along the lines of "a day in the life of three ensigns" although I'm sure it had a different name and this could work really well. Also the classic TNG episode where Picard was trapped in the turbo lift with some kids during some weird accident, that would be somewhat watchable from numerous perspectives, with some fine tuning.
I think most drama / soap opera stuff would work pretty well.
Maybe nature show documentary type stuff if technology improves enough it would be rather interesting to watch life from the perspective of ten different alpha male wolves (or whatever) as they live in a nature park.
I'd like to be able to watch a shit tier post 1990 documentary from PBS or cable without the stupid overlay of reality TV where they're always racing against time, I don't mind the pretty visuals and having graduated uni I don't need the narration written down to inspire 3rd graders. It would be more like a pre-80s BBC documentary.
Recorded music would be interesting in an era of "artists" being lipsyncing dancers and fashion models first and all that music stuff second, but at least in theory it would be interesting to see a rock concert from the POV of the drummer or bass player or whatever.
This is not going to be cheap, so first we will see fully CGI animated movies (I don't mean anime or rotoscoped either, but faked so well we can't tell).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @02:06AM
I distantly remember a Trek TNG or maybe DS9 episode along the lines of "a day in the life of three ensigns" although I'm sure it had a different name and this could work really well. Also the classic TNG episode where Picard was trapped in the turbo lift with some kids during some weird accident, that would be somewhat watchable from numerous perspectives, with some fine tuning.
It was TNG, "Lower Decks" [wikia.com], IIRC.
Oh, and you're welcome.