Deep Visions: Learning To Think In 3D

Until recently, the kind of better-than-reality VR you dreamed of as a child (about to be severely disappointed by a Virtual Boy) was firmly locked within the realm of time travel, Chewbacca, and the moon landing. A few ingenious souls never gave up hope though, and while we're still a ways off achieving Matrix-level immersion, the rise in the quality and diversity of virtual reality entertainment in recent years has been quietly meteoric.

VR film, in particular, has been quickly gaining traction in discerning cinematic circles. Since its Sundance debut in 2012, VR has grown to become one of the film festival's most exciting features and a huge part of its experimental section, New Frontier. Last year the goofy goggles even infiltrated Cannes and just last Tuesday the medium passed a colossal milestone when the Patrick Osborne-directed Pearl got the Oscar nod for Best Animated Short, becoming the first VR film to ever turn the Academy's famously fixed heads.

Perhaps most exciting is that with so much space to experiment a lot of this progress is being made by enterprising independent creators, of which Australia has plenty. Melbourne's own permanent VR Cinema, for example, began regularly screening locally and internationally made shorts in November, featuring a variety of aesthetics from first person narratives to psychedelic music videos.

"I think that's one of the really interesting parts of VR: what does happen when you take the actors off the stage and place them around you? What does that mean in terms of storytelling?"

"There's so much going on and there's always people pushing some new boundaries and frontiers," enthuses cinema founder Michael Lyons. "The programs we've got cover 360-degree video, motion graphics, which are 360-degree composites. There's time-lapse and things like that and then there's the real time stuff," Lyons explains. "And then what's emerging also is volumetric video, scanned, and rigged stuff, which are basically ways to record live action in a 3D context and then be part of that story. I think that's one of the really interesting parts of VR: what does happen when you take the actors off the stage and place them around you? What does that mean in terms of storytelling?"

Lyons and his fellow nu-cinephiles have been toiling the last few years to answer those lofty questions, as well as making progress with the more pragmatic issues with the medium. But has this recent VR boom been driven by advances in technology rather than consumer demand?

"It has. It has and it hasn't," laughs Lyons. "It's better, it's definitely better. But, also because we've been building as well. We've been building stuff and experimenting with stuff. For us, I think we're at a really interesting point where, we've been through this process of having ideas and working with the technology and understanding how the people and the technology relate. And what the key strengths of this new medium are, in terms of a cinema environment and exploring what it means for a group of people to come in and put the headsets on. Is it just like watching 360-degrees in a bubble? Or how do you break that bubble?" asks Lyons. 

VR is a fundamentally solo adventure; by donning the headset and headphones viewers are unavoidably isolated. However, Lyons and co's hunt for the greater possibilities inherent in this new media, has lead to a unique, custom-built system. After a quick photograph, each viewer is placed in a different physical location within the film, allowing for group VR participation.

"We basically built, over about two years, a VR platform, where you can essentially do these group [films], where you can see everyone else within the space. So, it's a little bit more like theatre. You have a story that the audience is choreographed around. We're really looking to pushing that type of VR, because it's something that we've found along the way by exploring the limits of the medium."

One of the challenges of this fledgling era for VR film is a dearth of original content. To address this, the VR Cinema is very much about supporting "content creators and developers, especially on the group VR", with a proposals system in place for aspiring filmmakers. Local artist Marco-O-Matic used the system to create steampunk parable Before The Junk Age; a cautionary tale about environmental trends that brings to mind the lost children's 'Tell' in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Floating through the charmingly animated short, the trash of a post-apocalyptic world morphs into long-extinct animals. During the film, and several others, VR's gimmicky history falls away and its true potential on an artistic level starts to become clear.

"What's happening at the moment is you've got traditional content creators coming into a different medium and a lot of them are applying, and it's a normal natural thing, applying 2D thinking to a 360, 3D world. And that will change.

"I think there's a whole new generation, a new wave of VR content creators who are just really gonna make it interesting. I'm really looking forward to the next few years in terms of the works that people are making and how they're approaching it."