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3D Virtual Reality Is the Best Storytelling Technology We've Ever Had | Big Think
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April 25, 2016
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April 25, 2016
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Humans do not experience life as a linear narrative, but storytellers from journalists to script writers typically tell us stories that way. 3D virtual reality is an opportunity to live stories the way we live life.
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RALPH RIVERA:
Ralph Rivera is the Director of BBC Digital. Reporting directly to the BBC's Director-General Tony Hall, Ralph is responsible for the development of the BBC's interactive services BBC Online and BBC Red Button. Catering to audiences who want to access and interact with BBC programmes and services through the internet, the Future Media division brings technology and design teams together to work in partnership with the BBC's editorial teams to create products such as BBC News Online and BBC iPlayer.
An executive with extensive experience in global digital media, Ralph was appointed as BBC's Director of Digital Media in November 2010 before being promoted to Director of Future Media in March 2011. Ralph joined the BBC from Major League Gaming in New York, where he was responsible for product development for the largest professional video game league in the world. Prior to that, he ran AOL's Games and Latino businesses, oversaw the expansion of AOL's international web presence and launched the social gaming platform games.com. Before his time at AOL, Rivera worked for publishing company Pearson Education, Simon & Schuster, Deloitte & Touche, IBM and earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia College and an M.B.A. from New York University.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ralph Rivera: The first wave of digital is going by where people have essentially been focused on digitizing what they already had. So you have newspapers online and radio online and TV online. And a lot of people first thought well, that’s it. And now they realize that’s just the first part. And now it means starting to do things online that you otherwise would not be able to do offline. And that’s what a lot of companies are discovering now. The ones that are the incumbents in the offline world are just starting to discover that that’s just the first part of being online is being digital. And now we’re getting into the piece where it’s about being connected. Being connected in a way that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to be connected. Being able to connect to individual people. So in media connecting with the people formerly known as the audience. But you can take that into education and you can connect with the people formerly known as students. Or you can connect with the people formerly known as patients because the technology exists now to be able to engage with individuals and also get the massive amounts of data that come from that. So that’s a significant shift that’s occurring right now.
Some of the immersive video, 360 video experience that we’ve done have been of Syrian refugee camps so that you get more of a visceral feeling for what that feels like, what it looks like by being able – and by the way it’s not just the video.
The sound being able to get 360 sound so that when you turn your head you hear things in a different way. So that experience has to come together. And that is much richer, has much more information packed in it which gives you more context for the story, right. Now let’s not forget that whether it’s straight linear video or VR oftentimes you’re still trying to tell a story. It isn’t just visiting the Grand Canyon and being in your living room but you’re in the Grand Canyon and you’re looking around. That’s not a particular story. But when you’re doing journalism about hey what does life in a refugee look like. There’s a narrative there. There’s a story. And so being able to immerse yourself adds more texture, more richness to that experience. But still you have to do it in such a way that it doesn’t detract from being able to pick up the story. And that’s where I think this is tricky because I think that the technology is ahead of the storytelling around it.
Because I think storytellers still feel more comfortable in tight linear narrative, right. They’ve already written a script and they’re just out there to shoot things according to the script, right. Versus being able to open that up and then how do you do that while maintaining the storylines that you want to provide. People are still figuring that out. The example I give to folks is like when Grand Theft Auto came out, you know, as a video game. ...
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