Experience Manifesto

VR Is Hot Again!

If you've been following the tech trades the last couple of days and certainly the last couple of months, you've read about the comeback of VR. Of course, it was really the initial Kickstarter success of Oculus VR and then it really exploded when Facebook purchased Oculus for $2 billion. It got another boost this week, when Samsung, in partnership with Oculus, launched Gear VR, a pretty interesting take on creating a head-mounted display.

It's all exciting for me to see, as I started this phase of my life doing virtual reality back in the early 90's. I was introduced to VR by a good friend, Dave Peters, who ran a company called Absolute Amusements. Together, we worked with the Virtuality system out of the UK and a company here called Horizon Entertainment. I eventually formed my own company, the CyberEvent Group, and we produced many of the early VR events through the 90's.

Back in the 90's, I called the use of VR for advertising and marketing Experiential Advertising, the ability to let consumers step into and interact with the marketing message. As I wrote back then:

For the first time, consumers will be able to enter and, more importantly, interact with a corporate marketing message. From traveling through the human body to playing a virtual football game, consumers will be able to experience almost any marketing world. Virtual reality offers advertisers the ultimate sampling opportunity and will present a clutter free event that will draw attention to any product. Experiential advertising is an excellent opportunity to influence today's sophisticated consumer.

And what was on the bleeding edge in 1991 can be just as difficult for people to understand today. Funny, I just came across this quote from an article about VR in 1995. Kinda' amazing how little has changed, isn't it!

Plus, a lot of ad agency people I've spoken to are intimated by the process of creating a VR experience. The trick is understanding the non-linear aspects of VR. And in the advertising world, that's an enormous, cognitive leap.

Randel Walser, then with Autodesk, took a cyber spin on that Confucius quote by saying Print and radio tell; stage and film show, cyberspace embodies. When asked about VR back in the 90's, we wrote:

It's the combination of immersion and interaction that makes virtual reality so exciting for the event industry. Never before has this combination existed in such a dynamic form and with such unlimited potential. As we all know from our own learning experiences, retention is much higher when we're involved in the learning experience and not merely acting as a spectator. The experience-enriched retention is the effect provided by virtual reality. By entering the computer-generated world and controlling their experience in that world, participants will carry that additional retention concerning your product, message or event away with them. It has not been unusual for us to over-hear conversations about a VR experience several days after it occurred.

We were very successful with that approach and when we brought VR to the consumers, we frequently attracted up to a several hour wait for our experiences. The problem back then was that the tech hit a wall and didn't continue to progress. In addition, content was pretty sparse, with many companies just turning VR into "Doom in a head mount."

But while at SIGGRAPH last month, I attended several sessions on VR and one thing that struck me was that they were having the same conversations that we were having 20 years ago. Still lots of discussions on latency and field of view and "cyber sickness," but still not a lot of conversations about the content. I have to say, I did hundreds of public presentations of VR for thousands of people and very rarely saw anyone complain about those things. And, when they did, it was in the context of how cool the experience was, not how they wouldn't do it until those things were fixed.

So I'm excited to see VR making a comeback and look forward to seeing what will be happening with VR in the future. I hope that the industry will focus more on what's important to the consumer - the experience - and not keep focusing solely on the technology. And as a Google Glass wearer, I'm also a huge fan of AR and as the two come together, well, the future will be pretty cool!

I've rousted up some old photos of my earlier work below, it was fun to reminisce about those days. Back in March of '93, I also brought a VR system to Live with Regis & Kathie Lee. I remember it being a lot of work to get set-up on time and then we only had a short segment to get it all done. We had lots of fun and it sure is nice to see myself without grey!

A few years ago, while speaking in Amsterdam, I also gave an interview talking about AR, VR and the future of tech.

Max Lenderman wrote about my earlier work with the CyberEvent Group and the Brand Experience Lab in his book Experience the Message a few years ago.

This is the Virtuality system that started it all for me. I actually owned the 1st two systems that came into the US.

The CyberEvent Group was the tour producer for the Cutty Sark Virtual Voyage and was on the road for 18 months.

CyberEvent Group produced a 26 seat Immersive Animation theater that won a top trade show award in the mid-90's.

The first VR installation on a Disney property, the CyberTron at Pleasure Island.

World Premiere Cafe

Ever have one of those ideas that you love and you know that one day, you'll find a way to make it happen? Well, the World Premiere Cafe is one of those ideas with me. Working with Greg Beck, I originally came up with the idea in late 1999, when we were working with a number of companies who were exploring themed restaurants. They all wanted a restaurant, the problem was that most of them didn't want to be in the restaurant business.

As I looked at what was happening in the space, I thought about the road theaters that I knew, places where road companies brought in the entire show into a basically empty theater. The core tools where there for them, like lighting, rigging, etc., but they would bring in all of the sets, etc., rather then have them made there.

So the World Premiere Cafe was designed as like a road house for themed restaurants. As described in the original deck created in 2000:

These locations will act as a “road house” for our ‘eatertainment’ sponsors, allowing them to have a complete themed restaurant and entertainment complex without the costs and expense of owning a permanent facility.

The big idea was that sponsors would sign on for specific time lengths (generally one calendar quarter) and we'd recreate the entire experience for them. For example, we'd:

• Re-theme the interior designs for the sponsor product.
• Rename menu items for the sponsor and create several key menu items based on the brand needs.
• Re-theme all staff wardrobe based on brand identity.
• Run promotional programs in conjunction with sponsors.

I saw the World Premiere Cafe as a 350 seat, full service restaurant with a 45 seat lounge, with a balcony area and VIP seating and a stage for performances and/or demonstrations. It would use lots of interactive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and others, to create unique guest experience. Table-mounted touch screens allow for ordering food & merchandise and playing interactive games, both with guests inside and outside the restaurants.

It's one of my favorite concepts and given my stand on how importance place is, I'm confident that one day, I'll see it come to fruition!

Base experience

The Sydney Games were happening, so I added them to the concept

The 2010 BVW Show | Building Virtual Worlds

December is home to two of my favorite geek events, the Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) show at CMU and the ITP Winter Show 2010 at NYU. I'll be posting updates from both events as they happen.

The BVW show is up first, this Saturday in Pittsburgh. My sources tell me that there are some pretty compelling experiences this year, so I'm looking forward to seeing what the students have created. Sydney with be with me, and I'll be posting her reactions to the show as well. Usually they open up the Entertainment Technology Center labs as well, so I'm really looking forward to seeing everything they've created this year.

If you're in Pittsburgh, you should try to see the show. They're doing the performance twice and the 1 PM is open to the public. It's well worth the time! And if you're going to at the show, make sure you say hi to Sydney & me.

On Saturday, December 11, 2010 at Purnell Center's Chosky Theater, we at the Entertainment Technology Center will present the annual Building Virtual Worlds Show. From virtual reality to audience interaction and everything imaginable in between, this live showcase of the most impressive student work from the semester is truly a must-see event! Over the course of this semester, BVW students are collaborating in four-person interdisciplinary teams to create a series of virtual worlds, each of which must be completed within a one to three week time period. We look forward to sharing a variety of these worlds with you. The BVW Show is open to the public at 1 pm EST. Hotel and and travel information can be found here

The 2010 BVW Show | Building Virtual Worlds.

Kinect & Human Joysticks & The Future of Motion Capture

Sydney & I had a chance to play with Kinect yesterday at the Augmented Reality New York Meetup last night and we really had fun. Understand that it's been selling well and have to say, as a first round of the product, it's pretty darn good! Biggest technical challenge might actually be space requirements, but in our playing last night, it tracked us very well. Here's some video of Chas Mastin & Sydney playing Kinect during the meeting.

And it's been fun to watch all of the coverage of Kinect has been getting these days and now that I've played it, I would love to have one (hint, hint) for Christmas.

If you knew me back in my days at the Brand Experience Lab, you know that I'm a big fan of the use of motion capture games. In fact, one of the first technologies that I brought into the Lab from the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU was this game:

Sure, people were occasionally offended by the content of that game, but people always enjoyed playing it. And even people who didn't play, enjoyed watching other people play the game.

In 2007, I led the BEL team that created NewsBreaker Live, the first in-cinema, motion capture game and we got a great response. Sam Mazur, creative lead on the SS+K team that worked on the msnbc.com game, coined the expression human joysticks, when he described the game. And the audience really had being human joysticks. For example, here are the results from the audience surveys we did after the games for msnbc.com & Volvo.

           msnbc.com  (USA)                               VOLVO (UK)

*       78%  played the game                           *  84%  played the game
*       93%  want more games in cinemas           *  68%  want more games in cinemas
*       86%  prefer a game to an ad                   *  74%  prefer a game to an ad
*       71%  unaided MSNBC brand recall             *  21%  better image of Volvo
*       75% more likely to use MSNBC                 *  37%  more likely to purchase a Volvo

The results really show what happens when you involve the audience in the experience. We had a 71% unaided recall rate of msnbc.com as the sponsor of the game. To put that in some kind of context, according to the Arbitron study of in-cinema advertising released at the time, 59% of all movie goers recall seeing commercials at theaters.

While Kinect is the biggest launch of motion capture, it's not the only one out there. Myron Krueger was doing interactive gesture work back in the early 70's. If you have younger children, you might be interested in what the DoCrew is doing. They've created an online game environment where the kids use their own body movements to play and complete the tasks in the game. It's a great way to engage younger children and, since it runs on the web, you can access it anywhere without needing anything special. Gesturetek has been doing motion capture for pushing 20 years. Tangibal has installed screens in the UK & Norway and Screenvision has a number of screens with motion capture systems here in the US.

As I traveled around the world with our in-cinema installations, I got to see firsthand how people reacted to these kind of experiences. It created a different group dynamic in the cinema, allowing strangers to interact in a different way. I used to joke that the usual social interaction was the "elbow waltz" to see who controlled the right position of the arm rest. These in-cinema games changed that dynamic. People talked to one another after the game and there was some indication, that people enjoyed the movie a little more after they played the game.

The challenge is that there doesn't seem to have been a big interest in repeat plays of motion capture games. It's a great one-off experience, for special movies, trade shows, theme parks, etc., but whether or not people want to play a game like this every time they come into a place like a movie theater remains to be seen.

Perhaps Kinect will change all of that. It has certainly created a new conversation about motion capture and what you can do with it. The content was fun and I'm sure it will only get better once developers start really start playing with what's possible. I hear there's already been an open source hack, so we see lots of interesting ways to use gesture tracking in the future. And once people start playing it at home, they may be much more open to playing motion capture games at other places, like movie theaters.

Sydney gave it the thumbs up and she'd be happy to have one at home. And when I see Chas playing with it, I know that he & his partners will do some pretty cool things with it too. I'm still exploring group games and we'll see where that leads in the future. But with $50 million in advertising behind it, you can be sure that people will know what motion captures looks like in the future.

msnbc.com NewsBreaker Live

An Interview I did on the future of cinema advertising

Volvo in-cinema game