The film-maker and co-founder of virtual-reality storytelling app Vrse predicts a big future for the medium, but admits he has more questions than answers

“It’s weird: you do a TED talk on something, and people think that you suddenly have a lot of answers around the topic. I feel like I have a lot of questions, not a lot of answers.”

Filmmaker Chris Milk is mulling over his role in plotting the potential for virtual reality (VR) technology beyond games, having delivered a TED talk in March 2015 heralding VR as “the ultimate empathy machine”.

Milk and his VR app Vrse and VR production company Vrse.works have been putting his ideas into practice with short VR documentaries including Clouds Over Sidra, which focuses on a refugee camp in Jordan, and Waves of Grace, telling the tale of an Ebola survivor in Liberia.

“Every time we build something new, more of my questions get answered, even if a few more questions come up. It feels like we’re getting better at it each time, and this is an evolving medium and an evolving process,” Milk says.

He was in the UK to deliver a speech about the creative potential of VR to the BFI London Film Festival, as well as to show the company’s films at the Power to the Pixel: The Cross-Media Forum exhibition in London.

That process includes figuring out the language of VR films which – perhaps surprisingly, given that by definition viewers control where they look in a scene rather than filmmakers – still requires composition skills.

“It’s just a different kind of composition. Rather than trying to contain something in a frame, it’s about where you are placing the viewer’s consciousness in space, and how they relate to that space, and the choreography of people moving around them,” says Milk.



In other words, while you decide where to look, a VR film’s director still decides what your initial viewpoint is on a 360-degree scene, which means they can ensure certain things are out of eyeshot until you turn.

In a horror VR film or game, that might mean a scene starting with a view of an empty room, with a monster lurking, ready to scare the willies out of you when you turn around.

In Milk’s documentaries, it’s more subtle: a scene in Clouds Over Sidra where you start by looking at a line of boys sat on the floor, before following their gazes to see the main subjects of the scene: a pair of wrestlers.

Another example: when Milk placed his 360-degree camera in the middle of a classroom for Waves of Grace, the children were unsurprisingly tempted to stare at the strange contraption in their midst. Which, when you’re watching, feels like they’re all staring at you.

“When the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by looking at the camera in a movie, it’s generally been used for comedic purposes, rather than feeling like they’re looking into your soul,” says Milk.

“As a species, the look of another of our species into our eyes has a great power. It can mean a lot of different things: aggression, love. But there’s a power to it for sure, and that power is translated in VR when it happens.”

Hence the “empathy machine” talk, with Milk hoping that the films being made by Vrse and others will help people to realise that not only is VR good for more than games, but that it can be a powerful storytelling tool rather than a gimmick.

“When people ask whether virtual reality will be a real thing or just the next 3D, what I always say is ‘take a headset, walk outside and the next person you meet, put it on them and see what the reaction is’,” he says.

“That reaction will speak to how this is really the next great platform for storytelling and art and human expression. It’s just that most people haven’t had that opportunity to try it yet.”

It is just as early days for the creators and companies making VR films, as they figure out its language – often while wrestling its technology into shape.

For Vrse, that includes working on the tools to deliver its films to people online and within apps, as well as the tools used to shoot and edit.

Milk is also keen for even more experimentation with all kinds of filmmaking, including those that might not be considered high-brow.

“In the long term, we do need to create a library of things that is not just about having 500 Citizen Kanes, because not everybody wants to watch Citizen Kane, and the people that do don’t want to watch it all the time,” he says. “They want to watch Scream or whatever. Sometimes people want to watch things other than high art.”

Even so, Milk has grand ambitions for virtual reality as a new medium for filmmaking – and beyond. In fact – and this is part of the reason he made a good TED talker – he is not afraid to map out a hugely ambitious future for VR.

Vrse has made a series of virtual-reality films.

“Ultimately, what we’re talking about is something really much bigger than an artistic medium. Right now, this is about a format that is interfacing with two of your human senses in such a realistic way that your consciousness interprets the medium as a virtual ‘reality’,” he says.

“But think about how the technology scales, to the point where you’re eventually incorporating other senses at further and further levels of fidelity. What you’re talking about at some point is more than a medium, but is fundamentally an alternative level of human consciousness.”

This may sound like the kind of rhetoric that characterised the ultimately unsuccessful wave of virtual-reality technology in the 1980s, as well as its rebirth in virtual worlds like Second Life in the 2000s.

Milk went on to explain that his point was more that as VR improves, if its impact on our senses is as powerful as he hopes, there’ll be important debates to have about how this new medium’s creators shoulder the responsibilities of that power.

He stressed that this is some way in the future. “In terms of an altered state of human consciousness being on the horizon, right now we’re still in the darkness of night, poking around with flashlights and trying to find our way there,” he says.

“As I said, I’ve got a lot more questions than answers about how we actually get there.”

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