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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: 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.