At this year’s CES, stereoscopic 3D as a feature has almost vanished entirely.

After it had been pushed by Hollywood as an immersive upgrade to the cinema eco-system and got hyped massively over the last years, what happened?

Audiences experienced that only few experiences were giving them a valuable immersive effect and most were not. The effect of looking through a stereoscopic window from a distance, often with small depth was not worth the bother of putting on the dim glasses.

This year at CES 2014 curved screens are all the hype. Immersion into a scene feels stronger, when there is a larger field of view, which curved screens are intended to provide. So field of view trumps high resolution and even stereoscopy when it comes to providing an immersive experience.

Enter the Oculus Rift — state of the art field of view

The vastly increased field of view of the Oculus VR vs. a typical 3D TV experience (Src: Oculus VR)

The Oculus Rift offers the best of all these worlds — it offers the largest field of view in the market and combines it with stereoscopy that can be rendered according to the viewer’s perceptive abilities and not to a low common denominator. It has the best immersion experience on the market.

And while right now many perceive it as a tech-demo, it is launching at the perfect time to create a new content eco-system.

In this post, I will look at how Hollywood missed the boat and where the Rift succeeds. In the second part, I will look at the new eco-system opportunities and content requirements that will make Oculus VR eat a large chunk out of Hollywood’s market share for providing immersive experiences (‘escapes’).

Where Hollywood’s last 3D attempt fell short

The Hollywood machinery features not only its various ‘systems’ of studios, actors, writers and behind the scenes artisans, but its key to its success has also been its ability to differentiate and innovate by constantly upgrading its technologies. Some of these technologies affect aspects such as distribution, reproduction and archival (encoding, transporting, encrypting, etc), but the key focus of many technologies such as surround sound, new aspect ratios, resolution and refresh rates is to provide deeper immersion especially for summer blockbusters.

The last attempt for new immersion tech was a renewed push towards stereoscopic 3D. Much of this was driven by the Studios’ desire to add an additional ticket price for theaters, but CE companies jumped on the bandwagon to put the technology into the homes of consumers. While I was at the Panasonic Hollywood Labs we saw 3D as the perfect leverage for Plasma (large-screen manufacturing and clean refresh rates above 120hz) and top-management quickly inked a deal with James Cameron that pushed an entire industry towards 3D Blu-ray standardisation and manufacturing of 3D television sets.

But Digital 3D has remained below expectations. Apart from a few flagship titles such as Avatar and Gravity, most consumers have had a lukewarm reception of the technology.

The first reason for this is that 3D is a personal, immersive experience and cinematic 3D movies have used the lowest common denominator for 3D rendering — one that does not make some visitors motion-sick, but in exchange creates a flat experience for the majority of visitor that have better perceptive abilities. It simply does not give enough immersion benefit for wearing the dimming glasses except for a few titles.

The second reason is that 3D to 2D backwards compatibility is not as simple as color to black-and-white. Most movies are still shot with a 2D audience in mind. Our eyes for example can extract spatial information out of a horizontal pan. This is why Dollyshots are all over your typical movie. In stereoscopy, pans and quick cuts are annoying because the brain already has spatial information and needs time to adapt. The best 3D position is fixed or in smooth inwards/outwards motion, allowing the eye to wander and take it all in, but few movies are done that way since they primarily focus on the 2D audience.

The third reason is that only a few directors have the caliber to direct our gaze in an on-rails experience that feels better than our own exploratory gaze would be. In most cases, if there are amazing worlds, we would love to have a look at them and be able to move our view across them freely.

The Oculus VR brings twists to the game

Oculus VR is by no means new core technology, but brings twists to the game: a focus on a massively improved field of view, thus offering a real feeling of immersion, a personal stereoscopic experience and a fresh content perspective from the interactive Videogame industry.

The first twist, a much improved field of view, comes with an important human factor — your brain is faster and more perceptive to changes in its peripheral vision than its focal vision. This however also requires for motion sensors, that everything that happens in the peripheral field has to correspond blazingly fast to your motion or viewers will be motion-sick quickly. For this reason, the Rift incorporates sensors operating at 1000 hz, which allows it to quickly respond to movement. This advancement in sensor technology which coincides with its launch frame also sets it apart from predecessors.

The second twist comes that it is a personal device and can therefore offer rendering according to a user’s perceptive abilities. This can happen on a connected device on the fly, via remote cloud rendering and for pre-rendered content also through the creation of new logical stereoscopic formats that could offer multiple, selectable renderings for the second eye.

It has to be remarked however that the personal nature of the device offers challenges. As an example, much of the home viewing experience nowadays is social and communal, which on the Rift will have to be resolved in the application space, if it wants to be more than an ego-device.

The third aspect is an eco-system with much lower barriers than Hollywood, and thus open to innovation by many developers. The actors, writers, set-designers for this new eco-system will come from a very different, more virtual world.

Why others have missed the boat

So why did noone else do this before? Sony has for a long time been the main leader of the wearable TV space. They have created 3D augmented reality headsets long time before Google Glass, which have amazing capabilities (I was lucky enough to evaluate them through the team that I led at Vodafone). They have amazing 3D innovation, both from a technical and a narrative perspective from their Playstation studios.

Sony however has fallen prey to the same mistake again that lost them their walkman brand lead to Apple’s iPod: Back then they did not want to disrupt their record label business and used heavy DRM, high content prices and vertical silo content stores.

This time with wearable 3D, they wanted to use their wearable LCD panels as an evolution of wearable TVs for playback of Hollywood content. So their priority was to have a perfect 100 Inch virtual TV hanging in front of you, with high resolution compliant with HD video-specs. But as we have seen the problem for immersion is that this is just a ‘window into a world’ for your central vision and ignores peripheral vision. It only creates a wow effect with simple motion, such as the real life example, when we’re sitting in a train and look out of the window and see the train on the other track leave the station.

From tech-demo to content eco-system

Charles Reynaud’s Theatre Optique (Src: Wikipedia)

In 1892 Charles Reynaud projected the first animated film in public. There had been a perfect storm of technology developments that combined his own development of the Praxinoscope togeher with advances in lighting technology and the serial capture of photographic images. Nowadays we would call it a tech-demo. Back then it was a fairground attraction, but its significance was that it was going to be the first step towards putting together the eco-system that was to create Hollywood.

Hollywood became a powerhouse by establishing high barriers of entry for its star, director and writer system, building up the big six studios and protecting it with high production costs. In the virtual world of the videogame industry these barriers are dramatically lower, but so far synergies have not worked, since from games to cinema, the narrative experience never crossed over, resulting in videogames that were turned into dreadful 90 minute video-game adaptations. From the other side, only a few movies had videogame adaptations that were able to use 3D models and audiovisual assets.

So what is changing?

Narrative and direction expands: Videogames more recently have become more experimental, breaking out of the dull shooter and platform genres, playing with expectations and narratives and providing new story-telling perspectives. 3D and physics engines are available to the general public which previously were only available through expensive licensing, offering directing possibilities for everyone.

Actors and sets become mainstream: 3D modeling has become commonplace with 3D software being given away in order to create marketplaces for 3D assets. These are available in any possible genre and this movement is coinciding with easy-to-use modeling tools and ubiquituous tutorials for 3D printing.

3D Visuals advance: Real-time GPUs are constantly advancing with non-real-time rendering setting the long-term goal: advancing to the point that a majority of product photography nowadays is rendered and no longer photographed.

These trends are creating the perfect moment for a disruption to Hollywood’s market for immersive content.

The experiences this new content market will offer may be initially closer to a 2 minute Rollercoaster ride, or to the 7 minute bottom time of a Scuba wreck dive than the 90 minute length of your average film. But this is just in line to the bite-sized app experiences that consumers have embraced on tablets and phones and which is disrupting the IT content industry.

In the second part of this post, I will look at the content and format requirements that this new eco-system will have to achieve to gain a good share of Hollywood’s entertainment dollar.