a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Writing a New Language of Storytelling with Virtual Reality

Episode Date: December 18, 2015

Chris Milk calls virtual reality the “ultimate empathy machine.” The filmmaker and founder of VR shop Vrse talks with a16z’s Chris Dixon about how virtual reality can connect with people in ways no other medium can. Milk describes the ways virtual reality production veers from the traditional techniques of filmmaking, and why the results can transport people to places and feelings that we’ve never experienced -- except in the real world. The discussion happened as part of a16z’s 2015 Academic Roundtable. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. Chris Milk calls virtual reality the ultimate empathy machine. The filmmaker and founder of VR Shop Verse, that's VRSE, talks with A16Z's Chris Dixon about how virtual reality can connect with people in ways no other medium can. Milk describes the way as virtual reality production veers from the traditional techniques of filmmaking and why the results can transport people to places and feelings that we've never experienced, except in the real world. Chris Dixon starts things off.

So now we have Chris Milk. Maybe if you could tell people what you're working on. We're sort of a media technology company that's building the tech to serve the evolving language of storytelling in virtual reality. I can go deeper into that. You've talked about, I mean, I've written about and talked about the sort of idea that there's a new grammar to virtual reality and how the default state is belief and not disbelief. Can you talk about that and how, and maybe some of the lessons you've learned so far? I think we're still figuring out how to make things in VR, but... Yeah.

I mean, grammar is a good word, because I talk about, I talk about, like, how we're writing this new language of storytelling in what is a new, medium and I would say like at this point we're we're just like figuring out how to sound out words like it's not even grammar at this point I think like in my take just doing using a lot of VR myself like everyone originally thought it would be first person games and it turned out to be actually very bad in VR yeah and they actually you know because if you think about it you're now in the body of that person and and all of these things we've built like people shooting at you which in the world of rectangles, you needed this intensity

because you were sitting far away from it but now once you're inside of it it's like, whoa, someone shooting at me. It turns out, at least in my experience, much calmer, third person or steadier and less violent experiences work a lot better. Yeah, so the trivial example, I guess,

but yeah, so the stuff that seems to work, like the stuff that I see in its kind of raw, unmoded form, having that spark inside, of people when they feel it that goes beyond just the wow factor of like oh my gosh it's virtual reality is feeling transported to a place and feeling connected to the people inside of that place that you find yourself in and there's a real there's there's a really interesting human connection that's happening um with the audience and the and the and the subject matter and the and the

characters inside of inside of the virtual reality world so you're building and there's a lot of And I talk about this, and I did a pet talk about this whole topic. It's like, I'm saying virtual reality is like, it is the ultimate empathy machine. You see people feel, feeling, resonating with these people in these worlds that you never, ever would see in five minutes. So can you talk about some of the examples, like the, I think the refugee camp? Yeah, so we did, we started really quickly. I got connected with the United Nations and started making virtual reality films, with them. We are doing all kinds of things. We're making horror films. We're doing

comedies. But I really wanted to do something with like a higher purpose right off the bat. So we got with the United Nations and what we're doing is we're making this series of films where we essentially bringing you to a place of people in need somewhere in the world and letting you understand their situation and their daily existence. And we're not just showing it to people on the streets, raising money, which we are doing, but we're also specifically targeting world leaders, both in the United Nations and places like Davos and World Economic Forum, the people that can actually affect change from the top down, and showing them these films where they would, we might not find themselves in a Syrian refugee camp,

which was the first film that we shot in Jordan. And that one, we tell the story of a, of a 12-year-old girl named Cedra, who's been living there a year and a half. She fled through the desert with her family and ended up in this camp. And then we just did another one in Liberia where we tell the story of this woman that survived Ebola, contracted it, survived it, and now is immune to it and is helping the community, educating the community and helping others in the community because there's a real stigma for orphans of those that have died of Ebola and they're sort of outcast and she's taking care of them. But they're very, they're very transportive So we see those sort of non-fiction things working incredibly well.

That's going to work well in narrative, but narrative is, you know, where when it's non-fiction, you sort of understand as an audience instantly, I am the perspective of a camera. This is something that's happened in time that I'm existing within. Whereas when you start telling narratives that are more like movies, there's what your perspective represents when you're inside a bedroom and there's a couple talking in bed it's different than when it's on the rectangle because now you're not just a witness to it through a window you're actually in the bedroom with them so what does that mean and can audience become comfortable with that

there's also i mean the things that that we're seeing don't work um there's a lot of things with camera movements and the way that you you treat the camera um that can make you nauseous. So the way that the big reason that you get nauseous in virtual reality is your brain is constantly checking

what your eyes are telling it and what your interphistibular system is telling it. And if they don't match up, you get nauseous. The reason that is is because your caveman ancestor when he ate the bad woolly mammoth or the poisonous mushrooms and he saw the world moving like this

and his body made him throw up so that he didn't die, he survived, that's, you know, that's your, that's your ancestor. So we have that now when you're in virtual reality and the move, the world moves in a way that your physical head is not moving, you get nauseous. So the first, like, best rule of practices out from Oculus was the camera never moves. So the first thing that we did was move the camera. And what we found was that you can move the camera if you keep it at a constant, motion. It's acceleration, not

velocity. Acceleration and de-aceleration. And because you're in a... This is what a lot of the games are, like, if you try, like, Lucky's tail and things, like, they have this sort of like steady camera following a character. Right, right. That seems to be what people are converging on. Right. So your intervisibilist system doesn't sense

constant motion like it does acceleration to acceleration. That's why when you're on a plane, you don't feel like you're flying at 100 miles per hour. So we can do linear. Linear is better, too, than not curving, but we're working with curving, and we think there's ways to do that.

But what's interesting is, so now we figured out, okay, that works, that doesn't work. Now what we're working on is, how do you break the rule just like a little bit to actually four creative results, right? So if you look at cinema,

you go to film school, what they'll tell you on day one is you have to learn the rules. You have to go through four years of film school and learn. And just for those of us who aren't film, like, Like, we're all used to now, like, so, for example, an establishing shot, right? You show the outside of a building, and then you, and then you show the scene inside of the building. But that took a long time for filmmakers to understand, right?

Isn't it if you go back, like, the old Charlie Chaplin movie, they show, like, five minutes of people just going in and out of Grand Central Station. Yeah, you know, like, and they don't, I mean, or close-ups or, I don't know, you tell me, right? But didn't it take a long time to figure these things out? So, yes. I mean, it took a while to figure that out. Editing was the first big thing where they realized, like, you could cut from a wide shot. to a close-up, and that there was a language to understand there. And people, you know, at the beginning of cinema, it was just a bunch of newsreels,

and they were shooting plays from the back of the theater. They didn't understand what the construction of a feature film was, and we're in the same position now in virtual reality. We don't know it's not going to be about making a movie in virtual reality. It's about figuring out what the equivalent of a movie is, what a movie is to cinema or film, what is the equivalent. equivalent of that in virtual reality. And that will take years to figure out. But we have to also, if you look, if you just look back at other mediums, they had to figure out the pieces

of the language before they figured out what the encapsulated storytelling vessel was. And in film editing was a big one, being able to move the camera. So they tell you these things in film school, like you need to learn the rules before you can break the rules. And great filmmakers break the rules for creative reasons and what we've started to do now and it's early days but we've started breaking the rules for creative reasons of virtual reality so there's a film that we have the film that it's called evolution averse where the train comes out of you and there's a moment of that where you you rise up off the ground and this is a film that I made as a filmmaker and I can make the camera go from zero to 60 in one frame and you won't feel you won't feel a sensation

in your body, you'll just see yourself rising. I mean, you'll see yourself now traveling up. And what I did was I built an acceleration into the move at the beginning because I actually want you, I want you to feel it in the pit of your stomach when you start traveling up. The same way that you feel it in the pit of your stomach

when you start traveling up in an elevator. It's actually the same, it's the same thing. So that's a tool. That's 100% of creative tool that we, and it's a tool that we've never had any other medium because I'm like I'm actually getting inside of you and tweaking your

physical biology and making you feel like something on an emotional standpoint from like technology to physiology to like emotion that's that's incredibly exciting special. Did you read you know the

Michael Abras stuff you did evolve the studies they did did you see this stuff so like they did these studies where people would look down in different virtual like they're standing in the room obviously but there's like they look down and it as if they're seeing a cliff yeah and they've done it a hundred times and they know it's not a cliff and yet they are unable their legs just buckle like they're unable like the the when you get the what they call in the in the business presence like this feeling of truly tricking your brain it

happens like the computer analogies it happens sort of a low level system beneath your conscious brain and you literally cannot you know your lizard brain has decided there's a cliff there and it will not let your legs move regardless of of the fact that you've done that a hundred times and you're trained, like this is one of the really astonishing, and to me at least was one of the really astonishing results, sort of how deeply it does sort of trick your. Yeah, well, that's why, your mind.

I mean, what's happening there, so to speak to the, like, the question of like, is this a new medium? And I talk about how this is the last medium. And the reason that is is because it is the first, It's the first medium where the technology actually allows the jump from it being like an observable technology to being a human interface where the technology is not observable. And that's because essentially what it's doing is it's mirroring, currently it's mirroring two of your senses so closely that you experience it as your lizard brain experiences the real world. And what's incredible about it is that even in its rawest first iteration form, or not first iteration, but first consumer iteration,

which is like a cell phone on a piece of plastic with some lenses or a piece of cardboard and some lenses. And you feel it on your face and like you see the pixels and it's not full field of view. You still have that feeling where you can't take a step forward off a clip that doesn't look anything like a realistic clip. I know it's dramatically better in the next couple of years, too. Yeah. Any questions?

One of the things that we wind up giving up, I guess, if we're, you know, putting these glasses on and enjoying a movie or music video, is the kind of shared experience that we have when we go to a movie theater. And it's not just the shared seeing exactly the same thing as people sitting next to you, but also the social experiment of, like, smelling the popcorn and, you know, going on in a specific time is there an analog to how that may happen almost like in a same common place um where people go to what was once a movie theater and now it's a bunch of you know pods that give you access to the best technology of the day yeah okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna

answer your question one way and then i'm going to contradict myself okay so the first the first thing is that you come to, I hear this question a lot and you come to that thought process by comparing it to cinema, which is a natural thing to do. So we all sat in the darkened theater and this doesn't work that way. And it doesn't work that way because fundamentally it's taking over the senses that give you that shared experience that you have in the movie theater right now.

I think that the first thing I realize is that it is a completely different medium and it's going to have its own set of rules, its own set of pluses and minuses and people don't talk about books not being a worthwhile, valid medium because you can't sit in a room with 100 other people and read them together and have that

shared experience. Every medium is different. Okay, now I'll contradict myself. So having said that, I don't want to make a world where everybody is sitting in the dark, or sitting in their own living room by themselves, having this experience. I think there is great power in virtual reality

for the viewer to connect to the person inside of the film, or if we call it a film, and I think that there is also potentially the great power for the audience to connect to others to have a shared collective experience. I don't think it's converted movie theaters. I don't think it's pop. And we're actually working on a number of different ways to accomplish this where, I mean, what you want it to be is you don't want, I mean, this is a, this is a, this is a technological virtual world that shouldn't, you shouldn't need to be, to feel like you have to go to a place and drive your car and park in a parking garage and pay $20 and sit in this room and then drive all the way home.

Have you tried toy box? No, I'm trying it. Okay, so this is a great demo where, which, okay, it's, and I think they're talking about it publicly. But it's one of the Oculus demos they've just done, and it's, you're with, you're basically interacting in this virtual world with another person who obviously can be, like, in this case, it was another room in the building, but they could be just anywhere on the internet. And it's interesting because it's sort of a symbolic representation of their face, like it's sort of a, I don't know how you describe it, and then, like, their hands. Like an avatar. But the sense of presence is very, very strong. I felt like it was a very

That's why it was a pretty It was one of the best To me it was like As a big leap forward as You know and it also by the way They have full hand motion basically now With this new thing Oculus Touch Which made another big leap

In this case you're grabbing What you're doing is you're in this virtual world's other person And you have these toys all over And you can grab these like guns And play ping pong and shoot each other And smash a ball and you're in outer space And shoot the guy and he shrinks And his voice sounds different

and you're chatting and you're high-fiving and you just feel like you're there and you're and the hand thing you just lose I mean it's not perfect but it's good enough that your brain is you're there I don't know yeah can I just sort of ask I think it will be very social in the end I mean I think not initially I think the and look I think it's one of these things my own view is that you know it's the the delta between kind of how the images look you know there's like tumblers of everyone like staring and you know men staring at oculus or whatever you know joking about how antisocial it looks, the delta between how it looks and how it experiences is wider than any other technology in my view. Like, you experience something completely different than how silly

you look, right? So it's helpful to hear the kind of views on the social part of it, but I'm also interested in sort of the technological part of it in a sense that, you know, when movies first started, sooner ever started, people would go there because they didn't have TVs. And now then people started going to movies because, you know, that was the place you could do 3D and I could do it in your house. Is there a moment in time now? where to do something you really want to do as a filmmaker would require very expensive technology to be the viewer. That's not the kind of level of technology

that individuals would want to buy, but they would actually need to go to a shared place so you could leverage, you know, I'll make something, and something cost $100,000 to have one of these viewing experiences. Yeah. Which people aren't going to be buying for a long time in their house. So there's something,

there's a thing in Utah called The Void, which is a sort of a large scale, virtual reality, interactive, kind of, like, I don't know how you describe it. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, there's a couple people doing like arcades, experiences, amusement parks, whatever you want to call them. There's the void, there's a few others that have come to us.

You see you're on a spaceship and you walk up to the screen and then you press the things on the screen and there's an actual piece of glass that you're physically. touching that's been placed there that's tracked into this world that you're in. That's something conceivably could do. You could add other senses. Basically, what you're doing is adding up. Have you tried the Game of Thrones one?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the big thing is like eyes and ears. Yes. Eyes and ears. Like Oculus is going to be the state of the art eyes and ears. But the other senses is what they'll do.

And I have to say, I was very skeptical of the other senses. I thought they sounded gimmicky. Now I've tried all the demos and actually does add something to it. It's very effective. Yeah, like your brain and ears are already tricked, and suddenly you have wind, and in one case there was, like, water splashing and, like, mist and wind, and, like, one of the demos is you're in, I don't know if you watch Game of Thrones, but this, the elevator that takes you up the great wall or whatever, and it's, like, shaking, and you can hear the

noise, and you feel the wind, and I actually thought it was going to, I was not expecting much, and I was actually pretty impressed by how, like, the whole thing worked for me, I don't know. Yeah, we had a funny experience at Sundance where we were showing this Vice News piece that we did where we went to one of the protests in New York, one of the big marches around police brutality, and we had a steady cam going through with the marchers and a vice news reporter reporting, and we were showing it at the New Frontier section in Sundance, which is a gallery space, and there's lots of people crowded, and everyone has headsets on, and people are bumping into you, and we put people in, and it's like six minutes long,

and they'd be in there, and we'd see people who go, oh, oh, oh, and they'd come out, and how was it and they'd be like it was how did you know like to hit me when that guy with the with the orange hat was right next to me like that with his elbow out and it's your brain automatically just starts connecting the senses together if it believes two of them so you don't even have to get it that close to to make it really feel something do you ever feel like with the current camera technology you're limited in what you can do as a filmmaker or like How much better do you think it needs to get for you to artistically accomplish maybe what you want to do? Or is that just not a limitation? It's, I mean, you build your own cameras. Yeah, we build our own cameras only because we have to. I mean, we think that's not a business that we're trying to get into. I mean, there's going to, there will be off-the-shelf solutions eventually, shortly from me.

We had Google here yesterday, like Steve. who runs the jump project is an example. I think that's great. And the main thing is camera, a camera looking out, in looking out. So it's a ball looking out, right? Which means when you're inside of the experience, you're essentially inhabiting the place where the ball of cameras was. And we can move the camera around and bring you on rails to different experiences.

And we're doing a lot of that, and we're having great results. All right, last question. Actually, I had two quick questions. First of all, just could you share with us your guest for the timeline? Like, when do you think a major movie, a major Hollywood studio will start producing these movies? They'll be available to the public. First quick question. Second question is more technical on how big are these files?

Steve from Google Jump was saying that it's like gigabytes of data per minute. How big are your movies? Where do you host them? Do you see Netflix actually storing these things? I mean, they're going to have a major explosion in data warehousing that they're going to need to solve. So how do you see the technical problem being solved? Okay, so first question, when major studios getting in? I mean, so we are working in partnership with all of the major studios right now.

The main thing that they're doing is marketing for existing properties that are coming out. So they're creating VR sort of. marketing experience, you know, like two-minute things to... Right. Not so much trailers, but standalone experiences. Like this Game of Thrones thing I described, which, you know, and Ready Player One, they're doing some stuff, right? Because, you know, Ready Player One's a very famous VR book,

which is now Steve Spielberg's making to a movie, and I think they're going to, I don't know, I've heard, I'm not getting it from you, I've heard just rumors that they're doing a lot of promos around that with VR, obviously. Pacific Rim, they had one. There's like a tornado movie that they have one. They'll show it at Comic-Con. And they'll put it out, I think Godzilla maybe has one, they'll release it to the public as well.

So that's the thing, is like, it's not about making a movie in virtual reality. Like, you can't, like, having a two-hour movie, it's like, that's like, when is the first play going to come out in cinema? When is the first book going to come out in radio? So you don't think it'll be a two-hour thing. It'll be. I think some, I think people will try to make a movie

because that's what we always do is when we find a new medium, we try to copy the previous medium into the new medium. So there will be movies made. I can't tell you whether they'll be good. Right now, if you told me that there was a movie in virtual reality that was two hours long and had to sit there with a thing on my face,

I'd watch it, but I'd know that I probably wouldn't be that comfortable in it by the end. And we don't have the language, like just even telling that the three-extructor two-hour thing in virtual reality, what does a camera do? like where you can't you're not going to cut like the way that you cut a movie is you have a wide shot and then you cut to a white shot maybe another way of asking what dan says is when will

this be a mass medium is that fair and like like when will just you know it'll be just like millions of people every week go and use VR yeah I mean that that that is that is that is a that's the big question is how fast that's somewhere between one and 10 years yeah so how fast adoption And no one knows. There's a lot of different factors. There's a, we now have, the thing that's moving the fastest is actually the hardware technology. We have all the major manufacturers building the consumer available headsets. There seems to be a lot of excitement and demand.

The thing that's actually the least developed is the content side. You will see, there's a sort of like wait and see from the, like, you're not going to make a $100 million movie right now because you're never going to make $100 million. back from your VR movie because there's not a hundred there's not there's not there's not there's not there's not there's not there's not there's not a marketplace to make it's really going to be this sort of what happens right is these these these these these these hopefully these virtuous cycles kick in where you get enough headsets out there and then developers come and then that makes it better and then more people come and those in my experience those flywheels are the hardest thing to predict in terms of the timing like we think it's going to happen

and it feels very much like it's going to happen and it certainly helps that companies like Facebook are investing a lot of money in it um but it's sort of like will it be you know like I think you could imagine next year half a million people buying headsets you could imagine many million buying I don't know so they're going to be expensive initially they're going to have

some issues there's going to be not that not a ton of content so it's going to be you know but the trajectory seems pretty clear I don't know I mean eventually it's happening it's going to happen it's just a matter of how quickly it happens I think it's like mobile like you know

95, you would have thought, you know, if you were telling it really, it really, I, my view is mobile didn't start until the iPhone, for real, like, you know, 2007-8 or something, 2006, 7-8, whatever, you know, in 1993, you probably would have thought it would have happened sooner. You know, you wouldn't have expected it was 13 years later. On the flip side, when it does happen, it really happens. Like, look what happened with the smartphone stuff. I mean, this is just everything now, in our world at least, like every website, every product, everything's focused on this now.

It's just replaced computers for the most part. I mean, desktop computers. So the internet is another good one where it kind of like it kind of went along, went along, it was academia, and then suddenly boom, right? I don't know. So on the file size of the tech part of it. I mean, we use Amazon AWS.

They aren't that huge right now, right? Because I've downloaded your movies on my iPhone. They're not that huge right now. They're not that huge. So, and we're about to come out with a streaming solution, you know, being a sort of like, we are a creative-driven technology company. So we build the technology to serve the creative, and in that process, it's like, I can, you know, a month ago, we could bring our file sizes down to make it load very quickly, but then the quality sucks. So we want to have, like, the premium experience that you're getting the best quality, the filmmakers want to come to us to have their experience. on our platform because they know it will look great.

But what's important to understand is we're dealing with version one of cinematic VR right now, which is a spherical video player with stereo vision and directionally changing binaural audio. That's version one, but there's going to be many, many versions after that. And version one basically is under a gigabyte for pieces that are like five to seven minutes long, generally. that's like sort of at the maximum compression that I'm willing to do with what we can do currently. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Chris.