Last July, shortly after Google announced its Jump VR camera collaboration with GoPro, Google’s head of VR Clay Bavor called me in to meet. The result was a short term, project-based artist residency, their first (using “early early” camera/algorithms with artifacts that aren’t representative of the current Jump).

I’m of the artist-as-bridgebuilder school and found lots of potential symbioses with old and new friends inside Google VR, around Google, and externally, and consequently proposed as a project a “community-based ethnographic VR experiment”, thinking globally but with a fast, lean, local prototype.

Areas of Exploration

Several timely and relevant areas of exploration emerged.

1. Close-up VR imagery from camera-originated material is awesome but tricky.

Headset-based VR is uniquely suited for experiences in the nearfield, “intimate zone”, where image and sound seem within or near arm’s reach. Screen-based immersion such as 3D movies is not very good in this zone, and Hollywood has long learned to keep most of the action behind the screen (except for “gotchas” like blood, bats, and broomsticks). For VR made from computer models such as most games, getting the needed different viewpoints for each eye is trivial, but when the material comes from cameras, getting these different viewpoints is much more challenging.

2. High quality spatial sound is as important as image.

Shooting with panoramic camera rigs often defaults to recording with panoramic microphone rigs, usually an omni-directional thingy on top of the camera, resulting in compromised sound. Using human sound recordists with shotgun mics or booms, or mic’ing every individual subject in view, is far superior but problematic. And also, if you do, how do you hide the recordists and gear?

3. Filling (and unfilling) the panoramic sphere has novel challenges.

Filling the full 360 degree view with interesting material, and unfilling it with uninteresting material, has its own unique challenges and opportunities. Early on, many camera-based VR filmmakers felt compelled to digitally fill in the “nadir hole,” the region at the bottom of the panoramic sphere where either the camera rig couldn’t see, or if it did, saw the tripod.

4. The “hyperimage,” a Holy Grail of interactive media, is well-suited for VR.

So if we’re good digitally filling the nadir hole with nearby ground or floor imagery, how far can we go? The “hyperimage,” an artificially overpopulated scene where “more” is “happening”, has been a holy grail of interactive media from the beginning. Each element can serve as an interactive link, and the more links, the richer the experience. Think interactive Bruegel.

5. Metadata-based interactivity, another Holy Grail, may also be well-suited for VR.

A related Holy Grail is “directed interactivity,” where individual scenes or clips or other media are all parsed and tagged with metadata to allow interconnection with some sort of narrative or direction, more compelling than a random walk. This grail, which includes “interactive movies” and “database art,” has its roots in the grand databases developed over many decades in anthropology, such as George Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas and most notably, Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox project. (Alan was a mentor and personal friend.)

6. Community buy-in is essential.

Finally, as VR cameras begin to proliferate, the vision of a “One Earth Model” begins to emerge, spanning from entertainment and gaming to tourism and travel to ecology and activism. For this (attitude alert!), community buy-in is essential, where production is a collaboration and control is shared between producers and subjects, at its best, in the spirit of cinéma vérité pioneers like Jean Rouch and Richard Leacock. (Ricky was also a mentor and personal friend.) Without community buy-in, in the end, the loss will be ours.