Many filmmakers have expressed excitement in virtual reality's promise for the future filmmaking. George Lucas, it seems, isn't one of them.

In January, Lucas appeared at the Sundance Film Festival for an onstage conversation with Robert Redford to discuss the importance of independent cinema. The two men have roughly 100 years of movie-making experience between them; in fact, Lucas all but invented the future of film when he founded Industrial Light & Magic in 1975. So when moderator Leonard Maltin asked, "What is the new frontier in cinema? How do you think new technology will change the industry? 3-D, virtual reality, all of these things?" people were very interested in the answer.

Lucas was the first to bite. "Well, a lot of the [air-quotes gesture] 'hype' on new technologies, I think, is overhyped," he began. "You still have a reality to deal with and that's entertainment. You have to entertain people. Of course, I'm one of those guys probably that 10 years ago, even though I was involved, I would've never guessed that people would sit in front of a [screen] all day long watching cats do stupid things. But we're there. I wouldn't have predicted that."

The man who gave us Luke Skywalker went on to say that even though he started out "as a non-story guy" he was much more interested in full-fledged narratives now than technological feats. Then came Redford's turn. Referencing Sundance's forward-looking New Frontier initiative, he noted that some of the new technologies were fascinating, but he also bemoaned the headsets and other accoutrements needed for experiencing virtual reality.

"It's nice to see what's out there," Redford said. "But for me, for myself, and the work I'm interested in or the work that I want to do—story comes first. I think there are a lot of exciting films out there, but I can see that it's missing a story. It's got special effects, it's got this, it's got that. But then I come away saying, 'That feels like cotton candy,' at the end of it. Where's the story?"

Near the back of the room, Saschka Unseld—the Pixar veteran who had announced Oculus' Story Studio just three days earlier and who along with Chris Milk is poised to be the Lucas to Milk's Francis Ford Coppola in the VR filmmaking world—sat looking deflated.

In the history of filmmaking, that exchange between Lucas and Redford will not be marked as a momentous occasion. And, frankly, so much has happened in the intervening months that it might already be irrelevant. But as a signifier of what people do and don't understand about using VR for storytelling, it still says quite a bit. Filmmaking itself began by making very short offerings with limited story, and then built credibility by making movie versions of established narratives. VR, if it takes even a tangentially similar path, could evolve from its current simple beginnings into something that borrows from established formats while also building an entirely new—and a much more significant—medium.

But from whence can we expect the Citizen Kane of VR to emerge? We looked back at media history—from books to Vaudeville to journalism—to predict how VR may, or may not, find its footing the pantheon of great stories.

The Shoulders of Story Giants

Looking back to the days when the moving picture was a new technology, we see a similar "Where's the beef?" debate when it comes to story. For example, early film producers responded to Redford-esque questioning of their narrative merits by adapting well-respected novels to the silver screen. "The producers of the 1920s and '30s were trying to show the importance of film by showing that these great novels like Anna Karenina and Great Expectations could be adapted to film," Georgia Tech media scholar Jay Bolter says.

And indeed, we see creatives like Montreal's Felix and Paul trying to borrow from the stories of popular films like Wild to make short-form VR; similarly Oculus is leaning heavily on Pixar’s established storytelling prowess for its offerings. Virtual reality is clearly different than film, but it might need to emulate it for a while in order to catch on.

But don't expect VR adaptations to play the role of cinema's geeky kid brother. Bolter goes on to point out that early cinema also had a slightly antagonistic relationship with great literature. "There's an implicit sense of saying film can do things that novels can't," he says. "They can bring these stories to a new audience, they can visualize stories in a new way, they can mobilize stories in a new way, they can create a kind of immersive experience that was different from the novel."

And by that logic, VR can create an immersive experience much different than that of movies.

Currently VR is caught in a dance between genuflection to—and disruption of—cinematic storytelling. Chris Milk’s experimentation with documenting protests in the streets of New York and Syrian refugee camps via VR, for example, is both in dialogue with and in defiance of cinéma vérité. Sure, he's being a fly on the wall in the style of vérité, but at the same time he's enticing the audience to become more involved in the viewing. Same goes for his VR version of Beck's "Sound and Vision." It's a concert music video, no doubt, but it also defies our entertain us tendencies by encouraging viewers to get up on stage and look around—to experience it as Beck does. On the surface he’s giving people documentaries and music videos, because those are the cinematic formats we understand, but by placing us inside them, he’s also giving us so much more.

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The Naïve Spectator Phase

And not only should we expect VR to stand on the shoulders of storytelling giants as it strives to earn legitimacy, we should also expect the self-consciousness of VR to subside as audiences adapt to its conventions. Like the first forays into VR storytelling we’ve seen in recent months, early cinema was obsessed with its proximity to reality, and even carried this obsession over to its plot lines by placing a "naive spectator” in those preliminary films. Sometimes a drunken sailor, others a country bumpkin, the naive spectator played out the audience's own stupefaction with and suspicions of the new medium. One of Thomas Edison's early films, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), features a character who nervously shies away from the verisimilitude of the screen. Immersive VR stories are no different—it's just that the naive spectator is us.

We can see evidence of this when we look at audiences in their Oculi Rifts (that seems right, right?) doing the “Uncle Josh” cringe as they view the Game of Thrones Ascend the Wall VR experience. (Guilty.) Milk even pays homage to this in his work. In his Evolution of Verse, a train is shown rushing towards your retinas, begging you to flinch the way theater audiences did during 1895's L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. But even that experience has occasionally had audiences that were a little too naive.

“We put people in Evolution of Verse and sometimes they just stand there,” Milk says. “And I’ll say, ‘What do you see?’ and they say, ‘I see a lake and mountains.’ And then you say, ‘OK, turn all the way around.’ Then they start to turn around and then they say, ‘Whoa!’” as they stare point blank into a flying locomotive.

Finding a Space for VR

But a-ha! moments only last so long, and won’t help VR move beyond the cotton candy that Redford laments. As Denise Mann, a media professor at UCLA, points out, television really began to take off when it figured out how to create stories that fit into the daily lives—and physical spaces—audiences occupy.

Mann notes the seminal work of Lynn Spiegel, whose 1992 book Make Room for TV explains how television actually adapted to the contemporary structure of the American home. Soap operas, for instance, featured predictable plot lines that allowed a housewife to ignore the show for a while and complete a domestic duty without losing the thread. Similarly, the early sitcom I Love Lucy confronted the fact that many viewers were women who worked at home all day: "[Lucy] was really bored and frustrated in almost every episode, and wants to engage with Ricky's workplace." The comedy of the show is actually driven by some of the tension in the lives of the very people watching the show in their living rooms in the 1950s.

Where VR finds its viewing "space" will also influence how it develops story. And while it's likely most people will initially experiment with VR solo in their homes as those consumer-ready Oculus units start shipping out, there's also no reason to believe we won't one day also see them in malls, arcades, or (surprise!) movie theater lobbies. Real success, though, may depend on creating stories that really fit the activities audiences tend to do in those spaces. (A VR experience that lets you pilot a Jaeger mech in the lobby of the theater where Pacific Rim 2 is playing, for example.)

Figuring out where VR lives will have a huge impact on the stories it ultimately tells. Going back to Sundance, it's worth noting that Redford was speaking in the theater where the festival's biggest premieres happen. VR, on the other hand, was being shown in an art-gallery-style setting up the street—nowhere near a red carpet. But just because VR is currently at the kids' table doesn't mean it won't one day grow up. Hell, it's at Sundance, as well most other film festivals, and every year its presence grows; the late adopters that cinema and TV had to wait for aren't moving as slowly to pick up VR.

Who’s Inside the Goggles?

And as more and more and more people adopt VR, many producers are trying to figure out who they become when they put on the head-mounted display. Dan Archer, a graphic novelist and fellow at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, meticulously recreated the suburban St. Louis scene and police evidence from the Michael Brown shooting to create the interactive and VR experience "Ferguson Firsthand." But then he faced an even bigger issue: What role would the audience play?

“I didn’t want to say you’re an investigator because people will assume you are white,” Archer says. “But I could say, ‘Do you wanna play a resident who just discovered the crime scene or do you wanna play the police colleague?’ That’s where I think strong VR is emerging: in the relationship between audience and character.”

And inside Oculus Story Studio headquarters in San Francisco, a team of geniuses is developing a whole new way for viewers and characters to relate. Take something as simple as a character's reaction time in an animated story. If you make the character rotate its head too quickly, it'll seem unnecessarily startled; too slowly, and it feels uncanny and unnatural. Good animators are obsessed with this "in-betweening," Saschk Unseld says, because "they understand the emotional impact of changing these."

This simple understanding, which Unseld is using as a demonstration of how his team is trying to get the main character in their new film Henry to react to your (virtual) presence in his story, may be emblematic of a larger moment in VR storytelling history. Like the nut Archer was trying to crack, what Unseld and his colleagues are attempting to figure out is how viewers will exist in Henry’s world.

The all-encompassing nature of VR makes it easy to tug heartstrings, but they don’t want to pull too hard. While Oculus Story Studio was making Henry, Unseld noticed something: Being close to Henry and having him not acknowledge you was just plain weird. So the team began experimenting with breaking the fourth wall and having the hedgehog notice the viewer in his home. “We’re currently labeling it 'audience-aware storytelling' or 'audience-aware acting,'" Unseld says. Every story requires that you relate to its hero (or antihero), but rarely—if ever—have they met your gaze while doing it. The effect is gripping. You’re still a naive spectator in Henry's story, but the first time he looks you in the eyes (and he does), you’re also an empathetic one too.

And this level of immersion is what allows VR to tell deeply moving stories in an extremely short amount of time, despite what naysayers may think. If you believe that Roger Ebert was right when he said that films were "empathy machines" (he was), then immersing yourself in a world where a lonely hedgehog looks at you before popping his new balloon animal friend with a hug might be the starting point for some of the greatest movies we’ll ever see. After an afternoon watching Unseld build exactly that kind of compassion, it only seems right to ask him about Redford’s comments at Sundance.

"For me, if somebody says it's not a medium for storytelling I always react like, 'What do you mean by storytelling?'" he says. "I went to the opening of the sensory exhibit that the Future of Storytelling put up. And [founder] Charlie Melcher started by saying, 'The king died. The queen died.' Then he said, 'Let me rephrase that, “The king died. The queen died of a broken heart.”’ That is a story. Yes, you don't have close-ups, you don't have these tools from [filmmaking], but that doesn't mean you can't tell a story."

Co-author Michael Epstein is a immersive media producer and scholar. He graduated from MIT with a degree in Comparative Media Studies and currently teaches a course titled, "Landmarks, Memory, and Mobile Media" at the California College of Art. His work can be seen at Walking Cinema.