- hi everybody. so we're gonna get started. my name's kozi, i'm asecond year student here at the ixt program. for all who is new, welcome. we do this thing every firstwednesday of the month. the point of this lecture series is to expand the definition of what interaction design could be.
usually it's not just pure ux stuff that we talk about, but we have people fromlike, museum curators, like ellen lipton last year and all the way to data visualization with nick felton. this semester we were thinking like we cover similarly diverse grounds and try to hit on topicslike emerging technology,
maybe like some current affairs, more like future affairs, and liz and i were talkingabout having a topic that was on vr or ar. milica and winslow's namescame up almost instantly when we were talking about who to invite for this opening event. so we want to have a talkthat's focusing on design for emerging platforms and less adjusted
thankfully, rachael, who'sa second year student here at new winslow and present touch, and we were able to put thistogether really quickly. but more formal introductions. milica is a film and vr director,editor and screenwriter. she has been collaborating for nine years with a performanceartist, marina abromovic on numerous projects,including the moma show, the artist is present,
and the kickstarterfundraising campaign for the marina abromovic institute, for which milica directedand created 10 videos. giant, which is the project they're going to talk about here, isher vr directorial debut. and winslow is a director, producer and crititechnologist,specializing in vr and large-scale immersive, experiential installations. he started out as a feature film editor,
but pivoted to art and techafter graduating from itp. he has created interactiveart experiences for google, delta, diesel andproduced the tribeca film festival trans-media award-winningdocumentary, clouds, which is super cool,if you haven't seen it. it fuses, like. it's an interactive documentary that fuses algorithms and cgi technology. it's about the futureof coding and design.
giant is winslow's fifth vr project, and giant premiered at sundance this year, has been shown at festivalslike cannes film festival, and milica and winslow justgot back from amsterdam, so we're very lucky tohave them here today. very excited. let's welcome milica andwinslow to speak to us. (audience applauds) - thank you, guys.
we thought five people would show up because of the rain, but. (laughs) thanks for showing up. - and a little fun factoid. erik foreman lives in thesame building as i do. so, give him a little gufffor not being here today. he says he's not in on wednesdays but i'll see him later tonight.
(audience lightly laughs) do you want to start? - okay, so, did anyone here see giant? i mean, experience giant. no. okay, so we're going to start. giant is a virtual reality experience based on real events. but before we start ijust want to briefly,
he already mentioned about us. i worked for 10 yearswith marina abromovic, and worked on severalsocial issue documentaries like fire under the snow and other independent documentaries. and winslow and iactually met 10 years ago. we both arrived in new yorkcity in the same month. i came from serbia, belgrade. he came from...
- maine. and we both ended up, i was an intern, that was my first job in new york city, and he was editorial assistantat the goldcrest post. so that's where we met. and i always advisepeople, go do internships because you never knowwho you're going to meet. so, basically, this is the only kind of benefit of our internship.
- yeah. - and, yeah. winslow say. - yeah, internships don't always pay well but you never know who you might meet. we didn't actually meetat the place of work, we met at the holiday party, so you never know. - attend holiday parties.
- so, just to give it alittle bit of background. as you can see in the middle, to the left, that was the first movie that i worked on. that is the spanish ormexican cover of the one because it's a lot moreinteresting than the american release cover. that's a tim robbins movie, which i was the editorial assistant on andalso did some voiceover work, because i guess they needed a boston cop,
so i could do that becausei'm from new england. and then some other musicvideos that we've done and also i come from a background, as kozi was saying, doing interactive art technology stuff, so on the bottom, as soon as i graduatedfrom itp, as you see, i was a creative technologistand creative director doing some installations for ted. those are the two projects on the bottom,
which also got re-purposedfor the samsung space, which you can see thatin the west village. some stuff with glen (mumbles) and also clouds, which isan early vr documentary about creative code. back when we first premiered it, there was only two othervirtual reality pieces at the time.
it's hard to believethat that was only 2014 and how much has changed since then. it was just a piece from, there was clouds and thenchris mill cut a piece, which was a beck experiencethat was originally a web 360 video, but it was imported fromflash into the oculus rift, dk1, and then also eve valkyrie the icelandic video game company also had
the other game valkyrie. so, yeah, as you cansee, a lot has changed. - so, i grew up inserbia and i lived there during the bombing of belgrade in 1999. and since the changes are still happening in the world today, idecided to speak about it. and then i met the scriptwriterof giant, lizzie donahue. i told her about my lifestory and it sounded to her like a movie, and to meit sounded just my life.
but she was the one who convinced me, why don't we do something about that. so we decided that she writesa script for a short film. so she came up with the idea of a family, that i'm just gonna just say, giant is actually about afamily hiding in the basement during the war. and there are bomb blastsoutside their building. they're hiding in theirbasement and they have
six year old daughter,and they cannot tell her it's a war going on outside,so they start inventing a story of a giant. so, it's a giant who'sknocking on the buildings and approaching their shelter, and wants to play with the little girl. so everything inside the basement becomes actually almost like a fantasy. first we thought, thisstarted as a short film,
and as soon as i read her first draft, i just fell in love withthe story she wrote. and i went home and aftera few moments i realized i really want to say this story using, through a virtual reality medium, because everyone is talking about it. virtual reality can induce empathy. and also, with winslow i attended a lot of tribeca storyscape events.
we started noticing that thereis a lack of storytelling. a lot of experiences just maybe flying or experiencing something,but we come from this film-making background and wehad the need to tell stories, and to see if this powerfulmedium can be used for that. so, then i actually calledwinslow, knowing that he worked on virtual reality projects,to join the project, and he, just without evenreading the first draft, he just said, "yes, i'll do it."
and then, i realized we need an office. so, we coincidentally met twoblocks away from new museum to have this conversationand then he told me new inc. is having an openhouse, we should just go there. so we, after this initialmeeting, we just walked there. so, this is where we endedup having our office space, at the new museum incubator. it's kind of like a huge loft, open space, with 100 artists from all intersections,
like the intersectionof art and technology. and it's a very diverse community from maybe even painters,fashion, virtual reality, architecture. so we got our one part-timedesk, there, actually. that's what we had, part-time desk. do you wanna say? - that's how it all started. and as you can see, our teamstarted out with lizzie,
myself and milica. those are the three of us. and then after working at newmuseum and calling in a lot of favors, too, 'cause iwas working at an agency, i was working with alot of different people on the creative tech side. some people working inside game engines, and then, basically, a lotof people were interested in this project, not onlyfrom the technological side
of things, because wereally wanted to push what was possible inside the game engine, but also on the narrative side. - when we applied for this part-time desk, we were interviewed by deputy director of the new museum, and they asked us, are you guys, do you havefunds for this project? we were, like, no. do you have a team?
and you want to premier atsundance that is in four months? yes. so they thought we were crazy enough, so let's see these kids,like what they're gonna do. kind of no one believedus that we were gonna do, and also, another thingis that the technology we used didn't exist. that was a little obstacle we had. - i think that new inc.and a lot of other people
were sort of along for the ride. they're like, these guys seem crazy enough to make it happen, so let'ssee, let's be part of this. and so, at the end, this was in january, so you can see over aperiod of four months we got a lot of people on board. because, i think, we usedsundance as sort of a carrot for us, which we'll talk about later, but a lot of people wereinspired by the fact
that we were mixing bothsort of an emotional story but also pushing theboundaries of technology inside the game engine. so some of the people that helped. that's juan salvo, all theway on the left, there. he works in color timing. he was our technical producer, and he also helped with,sort of, our pipeline. we had to create a specific pipeline,
which we'll talk about later. he's based in new york, actually, probably four blocks from here, which is where we shot everything, too. and also jack caron. he was working at frame store, actually. we worked on a project togetherbut didn't even know it. a merrill installation thatwas at sundance two years ago. he also helped worked on some of the stuff
with game of thrones. and frame store is known asone of the, sort of, leading vr production companiesin the world, i would say. so, he was able to lend his skills there. and actually, in themiddle of the project, he went to go work for microsoft hololens. so, hopefully, morecollaboration but on the ar side for the future, with jack. and then todd is actually our director
of creative technology,but he has a background in doing, also, as acreative technologist, but also he teaches motion capture at nyu, and also unreal engine development. - so, from the beginningwe decided that the family in the experience is goingto be american family, in order to bring closerthe situation of war to someone who probablyhas never experienced such a thing.
and we usually, as westerners,usually experience war just through headlines or in news, something that we can'tfully feel like we are there. and we thought to put peopleright next to that family so they hopefully wouldfeel like they were there and it's kind of happening to them. so what we did, we decidedwe need a casting director and we went, we worked with jessica kelly and mary egan-callahan.
we did casting and it was a week before we shot giant. everything was-- - yeah, we should probablytell about the timeline. - timeline was insane, basically. because at this time there's deadlines, and we had to announce who is gonna go. we didn't know, really,until the last second, if we were gonna be accepted or not.
so, what we did during the casting, because i was thinking, like, we have two minutes witheach of these actors. and we can't even repeat,we can't see them again, there's no time. what are we gonna do? so, we decided that winslow'sgonna be all the sounds, like, all the bombs. he's gonna be playing thosesoundtracks during the,
and then, lizzie, the script writer, she was playing the role of a child, so that that other girl who is reading, she doesn't have to do two characters. so, we kind of want to bringactors the closest as possible to the final situation. and they kind of went along with it, and i think that reallyhelped us quicker get to know who was the right actor.
and finally, we castedzoe winters as mother, jordana rose as rose, andclem mcintosh as father. we shot this video on 27thstreet and 7th avenue, close by. at juan's workplace. the way we shot it wasin front of green screen, as you can see, and wedecided to have a red camera, and microsoft connect to record the depth, so that actors are notflat, because we're gonna be
placing them inside theenvironment that is full 3d, so, we wanted them to beat least 2.5-d, maybe. and winslow's gonna explain how we did it. - sure, so, as you cansee also, there's marks on the ground. that's about, the greentape, because it has to also be green, that's about3 feet deep by 8 feet wide that the actors had to actuallygive their performance, which is, you know, super limiting.
and then, that's also a cycthat goes all the way around that's green screen, as well. so, we had to sort of, you know, we had to think of itmore like a one-act play than as a short film. we also had to, becausegreen screen, you know, such classics as, like,star wars: phantom menace, they're using shakespearean,you know, trained actors, but not always can you getthat emotional performance
you want when you bringin the green screen. 'cause it's hard forthem to actually relate with the surroundings. so we wanted to make surethat we were, sort of, at least circumventing that issue. so, you can see, there'sa solo cup on the right that represents a rabbitthat's in the space that very high productionvalue, as you can see. solo cup with green tape.
and then, also, you can seethat there's the checkerboard pattern there. that's what we used to beable to sync up the red 5k sensor that, thecamera, the red dragon, with the connect to,which is how we were able to use the depth data on top. a process called depthkitthat james george, who i worked on clouds with,was helping us produce, along with juan salvo, to really get,
this is something that hasnever been done before, so, at least, not on this scale, so we wanted to make surethat it was, you know, really precise. and, also, you can seethe place is, you know, loaded with kino flos toget a really even lighting, and that's important for keying, as well. we also were playing,when we were doing this, we were playing loud sound effects, too.
just like when we were auditioning them. 'cause we wanted to try to getthe most authentic reaction from these actors, andit was very loud, too. and so, we would do it at moments, too, where they weren't necessarily, you know, they sort of knew it was coming, but your body can't prepareyou for when you hear a loud sound, so we wereable to get, you know, the right emotionalresponse from these actors.
you wanna talk about sound rolling? - [milica] i will usethis, yes, this is juan. - [winslow] hi, juan. - so, he, you know, on typical set, it's like camera rolling, sound rolling, but juan was rollingdepth in these shoots. it was unique thing. and also, for these actors, just to, they never experience war,and they were in a fully lit,
green room. so, we did our best to kindof, with the sound queues to bring them to that situation. it was kind of hard on them. - especially when we didabout, i think, 27 takes of the same, which is,you know, very emotional in the beginning. just having to go throughit again, and be like, "okay, one more time."
you know, we were almostbrought to tears watching them do it, but you know,we still had to make sure we had it in the canat the end of the day. we only had one day of shoot,and as winslow mentioned, it was all shot in onetake, because, you know, when you're in a virtual reality space, there is no, like closeup, or anything like that. you have to see the whole person. and they had, how wide was in feet?
- [winslow] yeah, it was,yeah, 3 feet by 8 feet. - [milica] that was theonly area where the actors could move, so, we actually hadmore obstacles than freedom. it seems like virtual realitygives you so much freedom, but, no, we had to workaround these obstacles. - and so, also, i mean, a lotof you probably are familiar with spherical video, or like 360 video, where you shoot in a fixed location, that's something thatwe wanted to explore,
you know, maybe some other options, because as soon as youhave your eyes and ears inside a virtual space, assoon as you can move around, then it makes you feel more immersed. you have more of a presencein that environment. and so, that's why we usedthis specific technique, so the actors could be in front of you, and actually you couldget up off of your stool, and you can walk around the room.
we prefer that people stay seated, for reasons that we will soon show, but, you know, this isa different technique than probably what a lot ofyou guys are familiar with, where, you know, there's thenew samsung gear vr camera that came out, and thenthere's also, you know, like a ball of gopros. but, this is something different because, yeah, it allows you to havethe agency of movement.
so that for us was hugelyimportant to be able to give the audience a sense of immersion, and ultimately, empathy. here's another shot of us. we basically had, at the end of the day, we had a full... what's interesting about,you know, being able to bring in real actors is that you have the standard crew in a normal film shoot.
you've got half of them,and then you also have to bring in all thepeople that are involved on the video game side. so, it's basically, likea, that's why we had a crew of over 50 people by theend, 'cause we were basically putting two different typesof projects together into one. - [milica] yeah, wekinda merged film world and video game world. and i just want to say that ian vogelsong,
who was assistant director,he started at sva film. so, it's just a shout out. (audience chats) sva was part of this. - so, here is an exampleof the depthkit in use. you can see on the left,that is the video by itself that's been keyed out. and then, on the right, youcan see that there's the depth information applied to it.
it's really subtle, butit actually adds a lot of, like, your brain notices,not to get too technical, but we created somethingcalled the disparity shader, which basically meansthat each eye is seeing something slightly different,because of the texture that we applied on the right. and also, if you guys are familiar at all with video game engines,there's sort of two different ones you can use.
there's unity and unreal, and unreal has, at the end, i think, hasa more of a polish to it, but it doesn't handle video as well. so, we had to create our own video player inside the game engine, whichprovided many late nights, headaches, and, yeah, we didn't really, we didn't know that it wasgonna work until almost, like, the last week thatwe actually had to show it at sundance.
so, i guess, the persistenceof us, and also being a little bit crazy to reallypush ourselves to make it work, ultimately allowed forthis to be possible. and so, here, you cansee the unreal engine. this is a example of the composite video inside the video game engine. the different assets there are a mixture between things that areactually created in 3d software, and things that are createdusing photogrammetry.
which basically means you takeenough photos of something, the software understandsit, and then can place that 3d asset inside the environment. but, for us, it was also,you know, if any element, if the lighting was off, or ifthere was a certain flicker, or there wasn't a clean edge to the video, immediately, you'd be thinking, there's something wrong with these actors, like, you know, is this a sci-fi movie?
so, we wanted to makesure that it's a dance between the video and the game engine. and if we weren't in perfect step with it, then the user would bethrown out of the experience, and that, you know, allthe work that we put in would be totally for naught at the end. and here, you can see the footage. this is an animated gif that we created, which shows the actorsinside of the space,
to get a better understandingof what it looks like. here, so, this is, basically,this is how we started. from a lot of different projectsthat i worked on at mkg, the experiential agency where i worked, we had a computer thatwas, sort of, you know, different pieces from different jobs. and, the problem with thatis if you get underneath, if you get lower than90 frames per second, inside an experience likethis, where you have movement,
then you get sim sickness,which is, in my opinion, no vr experience is betterthan a bad vr experience. so then, luckily enough,we were, after we got into sundance, we werevery fortunate enough to be able to be sponsored by hp, nvidia, using the quadro m6000,and then we were able to get way above 90 frames a second. and so, that's just a little lesson on making sure that, you haveto consider the audience,
not just the user experience,but also the quality of the experience, because if, you know, milica, as she'll tell you,would after she put it on, would get, if the frame rate wasn't up, she'd be sick for the rest of the day. so, i was, yeah, when ifirst tried the first version of giant, i was sick12 hours continuously. like, the whole room,reel room, was shaking. so, yeah.
and the sound is very importantin giant and in general in virtual reality projects. we worked with aleksandarprotic, he's my friend from serbia, he alsolived during bombings, so we made sure to recreate those sounds that we actually heard that we wanted to, that giant is as real as possible. he also work with adirector from my country, kusturica, he's like aaward-winning director at
cannes film festival, andthen, after we premiered at sundance, technicolor, marcie jastrow from technicolor approached us, and we kind of collaboratedwith technicolor. so they brought scott gershin, who is the sound designerof guillermo del toro and oliver stone, american beauty, shrek, and a lot of video games. and scott did final sound mixing.
he added the foley on giant. and this is how it looksinside unreal engine. you basically are placingsound all around the room, and giving, and triggeringthem, i don't know, the siren is gonna go off atone minute and three seconds. you give those commands. another thing we did, wecreated our own time magazine that we placed inside the basement. and this is emergency shoot in 2017.
so, giant is happening inthe, like, near future for us, and you can see that stackof magazines on your left when you're doing the experience. - sure. so here you can see, asi was mentioning before, this is photogrammetry. this is an awesome free appthat you guys can download. it's called, it's autodesk 123d catch. basically, as long as thelight is relatively even,
you can walk around an object,snap maybe 20-30 pictures, then it does most of the work for you. it sends it up to thecloud, sort of crunches it, and then spits out a 3dfile that you can literally drag and drop insideyour video game engine. and then you have a certainamount of, like, you know, for custom assets, that wasreally important for us. it saved a lot of time andmoney, assets are not cheap. sometimes assets are actuallymore expensive than going
to a store and buying a physical object. depending on how manypolygons they have, which also you wanna make sure youoptimize because that can bring your frame rate down, ifthey're too heavy or expensive inside the environment. but, for us, this was the rabbit, which is an important piece of the story, 'cause it also somethingthat allows us to connect the live action video thatwe have with the video game
engine environment. they're pointing to it at the end. it's an important moment of the story, which we'd love for you guys to check out when we actually are atnew york film festival. so that you can see exactly what we mean. - and i just want toadd, when we were buying those 3d objects online, we have to think, okay, what will go in the basement?
well, what people don'tneed anymore in homes, so, like, we were shopping,and then when you purchase all this objects, there'sa notification saying, "this is a warning, theseare not real objects, "and nothing is going tobe shipped to your home." these are, i guess, thingsthat none of us had ever had to experience before. everything in this projectis very new to everyone on the team, and that's whatsort of made it so rewarding.
so this right here is, i don'tknow if you guys have heard of the martian experience,which was made by a bunch of studios like vrc, rsa,technicolor, and a bunch of other people who were involved in vr, spent, you know, a good amountof resources to make it, and they also have a $20,000chair from a company called d-box, which is a reallyamazing chair to be able to experience haptic feedback. we took the other approach.
we have a $45 generic, somethingcalled the butt-kicker, or also known as a basstransducer, and a $5 ikea stool. and people say it givesa very similar impact, or people have a very similar experience, so, don't always go theexpensive route and, you know, actually,yeah, somebody who i went to school with, you know,immediate saw the two. she's like, "i can create a jig." or basically, some way to be able
to mount the butt-kicker to the stool, and that's what we travel with. as you can see, there'sthe wire going up there. it's basically justsending an audio impulse of a low frequency to thechair, and that allows us to simulate the bombblasts as they go off. and this is hugelyimportant for the viewer because any type of physical embodiment of the virtual experiencewill help sell the illusion
of them being there. sometimes, you know,it could even be, like, people right now, i knowthat if you guys know punch drunk and sleep nomore, there's an experience that's happening that they did at cannes, that they're actually doing right now. i believe it's 835 is the name of it, which is in the west village,where they have a video synced and then they have, youknow, sort of like, you touch
the person when they're also being touched inside the experience. just that, just being able to have that physical embodimentof the virtual experience, wow, you'd be surprised athow much that will change the experience for the person. 'cause a part of yourbrain knows it's not real, but if they alreadyare getting other types of sensory impulses, thenyou'll be able to really be able
to bring that person to that place. and then this is, i don'tknow if you guys are, do you guys do max msp jitter here? well, don't worry about it. that's a lot of headachesinvolved with it. it's a really great piece of software, but it'll make your head spin trying to make everything work. you know, we had a really good team
of engineers who helpedus create these patches. a shout out to todd bryantfor being able to make this. this basically a lot all of the computers to talk to each other. as you'll see inside the experience, we have three different chairs. and this allowed for,basically, an iphone app, to be able to, you hit start,it triggers all the chairs, it triggers all the headsets,so that everyone is synced
for the experience. and then, this issomething called houdini. this was also a reallybig challenge for us, you know, to bring in adifferent software into unreal. this is what a lot of disaster movies are actually made with,because it does a lot of really good particle simulation. the movie san andreas,i think a the majority of the special effects wereactually done in houdini.
so, once you sortaunderstand how it works, you can look at thosethings, when buildings smash and whatnot. - [milica] so, i wanna sayour story of halloween. - oh yeah, so actually, so i was, when i was getting readyfor halloween, i was dressed as a vampire karl lagerfeld, of course. and, as i was putting the gloves on, i get a call from the head of sundance,
and of course, it's notthe right time to pick up, but it's never the right time. so, i pick up, and i'm like, "oh, hi," you know, "how's everything going?" and she's like, "do youhave time to talk now?" i'm like, "of course i have time. "this is a great time." i'm already late probably about an hour. and, you know, she's like,"okay, we really like
"what you guys," we gaveher the first iteration of the project, she's like,"we just need the next thing. "you just need to basicallyredo everything in three weeks. "can you do that?" i was like, "of course, of course we can." and so then, you know, assoon as i got off the phone i called everyone on the team, and they're all not veryhappy with me at the moment. but we made it work, and then,when we got off the phone
with them, or when they toldus a couple weeks later, the quote that they said is, yeah, and we hold this verytrue, "the greatest gift "we can give a filmmaker is a deadline." and i think that's true for any experience or any type of project. - yeah, and finally, they saw giant, not fully completed, on theday when sundance needed to decided.
and they were like, "guys,if you don't give us "within an hour, that's it. "you're not part of sundance." so, we finally got in. this is the desk, actuallythe one that is packed with all the boxes. this is our desk at new inc. this is how it looked when we left. we had to put all of our belongings there.
to bring the rest of theequipment to sundance, basically, we were schleppingwith us four computers, each time we go. this is this, kindalike, early dinosaur age of virtual reality. yes, so, because eachcomputer, how we actually show at sundance, we're gonnaexplain what we did. we set up three chairs. we decided that we wannashow to more people,
as many people as possible. so, usually, virtual realityexperience is one-by-one, so it goes really slow. so, we decided to have threepeople at the same time. we also decided to build theinstallation that is, like, 15 by 15 feet dark roomthat resembles a basement where giant is actually happening, so that you, already when youenter, you have that feeling of claustrophobic and darkness.
so, it kind of puts you in that mood. and we trigger, thanks to todd bryant, we trigger all these threeexperiences at the same time. and, you wanna add your? - well, i think that thisalso really helped us, being able to work with a scenic designer. again, calling in favorsfrom when i worked doing experiential installations. this really helped us.
you know, you can planas much as you want, but, once you actually put in place what you think it's gonna look, and what the user experience isgonna be, that solves a lot of problems. you can make the most amazing experience, but if you don't reallytake into consideration the person who's gonna be using it, and also how you're goingto be implementing it,
not only once, but, youknow, think about this, we referred to the fact thatit feels like we've been in a band touring around the world, playing the same song for threepeople every eight minutes. so, really have to thinkabout being able to maximize the audience participationin a space like this, be able to make sure that ifit crashes you have a plan b, a plan c, and really, youknow, not let anyone, you know, just basically, there'sa certain theater of us
being able to bring theminto this dark space, tell them the story, sit them down, and then once they're done with it, they can be in a darkenvironment, so that they feel comfort, and they don't haveto feel like anyone's breathing down their shoulder. we wanna give them a certainamount of intimacy and privacy when it comes to this experience,because it is emotional. - [milica] and then atthe end of the experience,
we project this statement. - so, as you can see, our back of house, this is our railroad apartment basically, with a nice exposed brick. yeah, so, these are ourtwo artists who helped us with the project, toddbryant and jack caron, and there's four computers back there, you probably can't seeit, but they're sort of tucked away.
this is about a 2.5 foot space. it got really hot back there, but todd is all smiles,such a good trooper. and, what was reallyinteresting about the experience is that we actually had preview monitors. i don't know if you guyshave used cameras shooting like, you know, 5ds or, there'sa little preview monitor. that's what we used to be able to see what each person is lookingat, and that was helpful
for us to make sure that theheadsets were being calibrated properly, but it's alsointeresting to see, you know, we had all three next to each other, you could see, basically, through the eyes of another person. so, for us, that was reallyhelpful in further iterations of the experience, youknow, should we move a sound somewhere else,should we move an object somewhere else, you know,is the timing right,
or, you know, if there'ssomebody who you really respect who works in the film industry,you know, watching it, you can see it through theireyes and really get a sense of, you know, what theygot out of the experience, which we thought was a reallyamazing opportunity for us as filmmakers, to see that. i've never experiencedanything like that before. - [milica] at sundance new frontier, the way they were exhibitingvirtual reality work was
inside one building, andit's really all day long. it's not like you have amoving screening twice. no, we have to literally be10 hours a day letting people, every 10 minutes, lettingpeople in and out for 10 days, which is amazing becausewe got to meet everyone who saw giant so far beforewe distributed in this fall. another thing we didn'tmention is that we completed the project. giant was finalized two hoursbefore sundance started.
and when sundance started,the first people who got in were press, actually. and then, also anotherthing we didn't mention is that we worked, i don'tknow, like, 15 hour days, probably for september, even more. like, there is nothingglamorous in making vr at this early stages of vr. it is cool to be apioneer and do it first, but it is very difficult, actually,
because we, as youheard, we had to come up with our own pie planthat started working only a week before sundance. so, yeah, i think the shirewas also the program where, like, a day beforesundance started, she asked to see it, and we werelike, it's not done. she was like, "guys, ifyou really don't finish it, "we are not showing it." so even that pressure wasabove us all the time.
but, what was amazing is thatwe brought our whole crew to sundance. everyone was there, and whatwas even more amazing was, actually, the response of the audience, that's something we didn'tknow what can happen because we didn't have achance to show it to anyone before sundance started. so, literally, our firstaudience was guardian, news week, usa today,just like no pressure.
luckily, luckily, they liked it. first press, and thencame in the audience, and many people cried. many people had conversations with us, telling us, "i willnever read the newspaper "in the same way. "i will never think aboutthe war in the same way, "because i felt like itwas happening to me." and i think the strongestemotional response was coming
with people who have children,because they were projecting their own childrenthere, and were connected with the experience. we also had people whoexperienced war who saw it, and thought it was, theylived in the basement during a bombing, as well. - and that's also an importantthing to mention, too, is that we wanted to makesure that people knew what they were getting themselves into.
so, we say a disclaimerbefore the experience that we're going to beplacing the audience inside a basement with afamily that is in an active conflict zone, without, youknow, giving away too much, but also letting them knowthat, you know, that this is not a vr demo where we're placingyou where you can, you know, build a castle or you'reskiing on the alps, or, you know, something thata lot of people are used to when it comes to vr experiences.
and i think a lot of peoplewere taken, you know, there was a profoundexperience with certain people because they had never been confronted with something emotional in vr before. and for us, that was ahuge compliment to be able to have the reaction thatwe did for the audience - and it also kind ofcompleted the mission of giant, is to evoke emotions andunderstanding of those people in war zones right now,as we are standing here.
and then after sundance,we again, we thought that, you know, we just gonnago home, and sleep, but that never happened,because it's been nine months that we are just touring the world, which is incredible. we continued showing. we showed at nab to the cgame developer conference, and we showed it at cannes film festival, and cannes was verydifferent than sundance.
it wasn't cold, definitely. - yeah, it was not a dark room where, honestly, at sundance,we didn't know what time of day it was. we'd go outside and i felt like a vampire, 'cause there'd be sunlight,you know, when i would go and grab, like, a bite toeat or something, like, out of the storage facility that we had, where this was like, a lot more relaxed,
there were actually swansthat were hanging out. it was, yeah, totallydifferent environment. and it was really niceto be able to also show a european crowd, which is, i mean, here, i would say the biggestdifference is that they just don't have any exposureto vr like we do here. and that will be verydifferent in a period of two years, as i said, whenwe had clouds at sundance in 2014, there's only three pieces.
this year, in france,there was already probably 36 pieces represented, anda majority of those were inside the samsung gearvr, which were spherical video pieces, more linear,less interactive content. but, next year, it'll change. you know, even at sundance,it was three pieces in 2014, i believe, 16 pieces in 2015, and then, like 35 pieces this year. but this next year, 2017,i think will be even twice
as big as that, so it's areally good time to be involved in this, because there's so much interest, and everyone is stillvery much in the sort of, the spirit of sharingwhat they've learned, because nobody has the answers. there's no like magic bulletor holy grail to vr right now, and everyone's slowly sort of, you know, understanding, you know,getting their feet wet, or pushing the boundariesof what's possible,
and it's very much likea community effort. it's great to be ableto meet, you know, like, people like you, and other people as we've been showing this, to be able to share this and also hear, you know, what you guys think about it, because, you know, it's anyone's gamewhen it comes to vr right now. - our next screening, and wherewe are inviting all of you to see giant is gonna beat new york film festival
at lincoln center. convergence is the sectionfor vr and ar projects, so, it'll be screened on1st and 2nd of october. again, every 10 minutes, we're gonna have the same installation asat sundance, three chairs. it's for free and i thinkyou will go on the website and you book your time slot. and we would love to seeyou there, definitely. so, you know, what are weactually talking about.
- but if you guys can'tmake it there, or also want to see it in the comfort of your own home, these are the differentplatforms which we'll be launching it on. as you can see, though, fromthe middle and the lower left, those are untethered headsets,so not only are we going to have it as something that'sinside the video game engine, that means it's a 6 dofexperience, or six degrees of freedom, which is aterm that basically means
that you can move all around the space. you're not in a fixed point. but then, the one in thecenter and lower left, that's the googlecardboard and the gear vr. that will be as a spherical video, so, we're basically taking the experience, finding one point, andexporting that perspective, and that's sort of the more common way for most device to be experiencing vr.
but, yeah, we're reallyexcited to be able to get it on all those so that we canget it into as many households as possible. - what we usually, just to try to wrap up this whole presentation,this is how it actually felt making giant. it was terrifying. (audience laughs) every single second wasterrifying, until the moment
we really opened thedoor for the audience. but, i'm glad we had eachother, and we had amazing team that's of our friends andcollaborators that were all of us were just believing so strongly in this project. that that was pushing usforward, all the time. now, we have a 360 photowith all of you guys. are gonna be in the shot, soeverything is in the photo. - so, here we go, everyone.
- you can raise yourhands, maybe it's like. say cheese. virtual cheese. there we go. got it. i'll get another one,just for good measure. okay.- okay. - we can send that to koziso you guys can see it. - this is, by the way,great, if you don't know
about data, record data. it's $350. we are not paid by them,although we should be, because we are advertisingthem everywhere. it's so good to practice. it's so handy, it's small,and, you know, you can just make all sorts of mistakes with that. - also, a lot of people whouse 360 degree camera arrays, you know, not just one likethis, use this for prototyping,
say, if you wanna be ableto block actors in a space, you know, you don't wannahave to rent a camera for all those days, you can use this. the resolution is notgreat, the next version will probably be 4k, but forthis, as far as prototyping, it will do, and also for,you know, a party trick, too, it's great. you can get 'em at adorama,which is obviously super close, and you can get 'em, i think, even online,
they might be $330 now, too. but yeah, just drop ourname when you buy it. - anyway, thank you for listening to us. - so, what we're gonna donow is we're just gonna move into, like, a moderatedconversation part of the session. we're just gonna, like, take a seat. i'm gonna have david,who's another second year in the program join us. david, he will tell youshortly why he's joining us,
actually, i'll tell you a bit. he worked on some 360 videostuff over the summer. all right, you go. - yeah, i worked with mpr todo a story on rocky mountain national park. a very different, and muchcheaper, and less interactive scale than what you just saw. but i think it kind ofrepresents the opposite side of what you can do withouta full production crew
when you're trying to make it for web vr and as flexible as possible,also out in the mountains. - cool, all right. so, we're gonna do, i've gotlike a list of like eight questions, we're gonna talk a little bit about various topics,and then, afterwards, like open it up to thefloor for another 15 minutes for open questions. but let's do this.
so, whoa, we're actually verytightly cramped together. (laughter) i wanna start-- - we still have that one desk (kozi drowns out milica) - we're used to cramped,dude, it's all good. - yeah, we wanna experiencethe production process. but we wanna start with like process. how you guys, like, filmed the project.
you know in the traditionalfilmmaking you are able to communicate any changes to the idea, so like, what you wannashoot with, you know, like story-boarding, and just 2d imagery. but in this case, giventhat it's more immersive, how would you communicate any new ideas, any changes to like the crew, the cast, during the process? was there anything different?
- you mean from the film? - compared to the film? - when you were making it. - okay, something thatwe almost had to unlearn everything we know as filmmakers, and start learning from scratch. and what we always advise to people is to have a test shoot if you're doing vr, if you're starting.
and that's what we had. we shot this twice. each time is just one day of shoot. and we shot it once, andthen you put the headset on. virtual reality is experience. until you really put thatheadset on and experience it, you can't know if it'sworking on a, you know, on a 2-d screen. doesn't matter really.
so, we learned a lot from the first shoot, then we implemented thosechanges in the second one, and something that wealso learned with working with actors is that they areactually shot in a wide shot, but they had to act likeit's tight close up. because you're there, you'rethere with them in that space, so, it can be like overacting. - yeah, people who havea more theatrical - theatric, theatrical?
background, we find really,those are the people that, i think, work better in vr. and a lot of the blocking, youknow, had to be reconsidered. also, the technology that we used, people had to sort of exist on a plane. there couldn't be a lotof people sort of running around each other becauseof the depth camera. i don't know if you guysare familiar with some of the videogrammetrytechnology out there?
like 8i, uncorporeal, 4d views,microsoft also has a rig, where basically, theyused a different technique and this is something that wewere interested in looking at where it is, you have a,maybe a 4 to 6 foot platform that the person can be actingon, or can be captured, and then you have a cameraarray of, say, anywhere from 40 to 60 cameras, andthat's capturing, you know, all the different, basically,it's using all these different cameras to puttogether a volumetric video.
and while that's great, youcan't have multiple actors because, as soon as peopleget near each other, then the information, thecameras, because they're here, that's basically creatingsomething called occlusion, and so it makes it really difficult. so, when we were doing it, we understand that we had one depth camera,and one sensor capturing the actual video. so, we had to reallythink about, you know,
in the script and how theactors were interacting with each other, howto keep it believable, but also put them on a plane. and then in post, be able togive that plane a little bit of depth through thecamera that we were using. so, it was kind of likeour weakness, you know, of our technology, kindof became our strength, or that was our mainconsideration for how do we make this work, and then somepeople are very pleased
with the fact thatyou're a passive witness in this experience, and it'smore like a one-act play then something where eitheryou have to do too much interactivity, and yousort of lose the story, or something where youdon't feel like you're there because you're sort of so far away that you don't feel like you're, yeah, part of the action. - did you guys considerusing audience participation,
or doing more interactive things? - no, i mean we didn't have any budget, so that was our creative guideline. i mean, those actors,i just wanna add, like, they had so manyrestrictions coming from us, just that small space that they can move, then we gave them so many rules, how they can touch each otheror not touch each other, or walk in front ofeach other or not walk,
and then, as i said, they were acting in this green screen room, and they had to act for the close up, and it was so emotional,they had to cry, i mean, i don't almost know how they did it. i never will understand actors, they have my full appreciation, always. i think that's thehardest job in the world. - yeah, one thing thati was thinking about
as you guys were talkingabout the project was, you know, like how allthese services spring up, third party servicesspring up to support new, emerging technologies, and obviously, there're new devices,there're new technology, but i wonder if actorsare now being trained to act in vr, you know. - i think it's gonna happen. it has to happen.
it's really, we learned ina hard way, how to do it. - also, just talking aboutthe audience participation, i think that's a reallyinteresting question because when you're planning your project, you have to think aboutis the audience gonna be a passive witness oran active participant, and if they're gonna bean active participant, then what is their interaction gonna be, and for us, you know, ifthey were to be interacting
in the story, then thefamily would recognize them and that would change the plot. so, for us, it didn't make sense for it. it would actually probably be a burden, or, you know, too muchresponsibility for the first person, for the, you know, theperson with the headset on, with the control to betrying to figure this out. where, you know, we're usedto seeing everything in a 16 by 9 frame, we're used tocoming home after a hard day's
work and having somethingbe the entertainment for us. the difference between vr, and, you know, it doesn't have to befull-scale immersion, is, you know, what is the audience's role. do they just what to beable to put on a headset and be able to travelthrough some amazing journey that somebody else has laid out? or are they the protagonist? you know, it's an interestingquestion when you think about,
yeah, the role of theuser in their, sort of, in how they can influence the story. - also, one of the biggestlimitations of giant was that they actors couldn'twalk around you as a viewer, and that was because weshot it with one camera, so they couldn't really go behind you, so we had to come up withsome other creative solutions to bring the rest of the basement to life. so you have, maybe, dust particles falling
at certain point, or thewindow explodes here, or you're looking for something there, so we made sure that you also turn around. but actors are always in front of you. that's maybe even thebiggest criticism of giant. we know what are the problems with giant. it's almost hard tocriticize when we agree with everyone. we are actually waitingfor that technology
to be developed. the volumetric capturewhere you practically as an actor would stand in the center and all the area of cameraswould be around you. but that technology's still not perfect. so, we decided to use the depthkit. - no, it's not perfect. it's not only not perfectbut it's extremely expensive. - well, now that youbring up the criticisms,
i'm just curious, whatother limitations are there in giant, besides the limited? - i mean... - maybe this thing withthe user, we now want in our next project thatyou as a viewer will have more advocacy, moreparticipation in the piece. but in this one, we couldn't really, or we could, but we hadto wait maybe three years to make giant, but we didn't want to wait.
- i mean, in any project,you know, time and money, we basically funded this project ourself, and then were able to getsponsorship after we got into sundance, which, youknow, is not necessarily the best business model, 'cause, i mean, we're very fortunate that it went well, but if we didn'tobviously, if the project, if we didn't get in, thenwe wouldn't be having this conversation here,and then we'd be a lot
of money in debt. it was the, i think, thestory and the technology that, you know, we alreadyhad some experience with, you know, sort of the marriageof the two really pushed our whole team to dothings new, but i think that if everyone, youknow, if we didn't have to work such crazy hours andhad more time to put into it, then i think that we would've, you know, certain things would'vemaybe looked better.
certain textures would've been better. you know, there's so many,there's the difference between these experienceand when you lock a picture, when you lock a picture you're done. you know, when you got to a film festival. but we noticed everyone who was involved in the interactive portion, assoon as people are using it, then you go home and you fix it. you fix whatever they were doing wrong,
and you upload the new version, you know the new build,and you keep iterating new versions, so it'snever ever fully complete. you can always keep advancing on it, but at some point, you haveto sort of put your foot down and be like, you know,it's done, you know. you have to sort of put it to bed, and then also, think abouthow it would be, you know, when you actually have to distribute it.
then you're really done, 'cause you can't, i mean, theoretically you cankeep uploading new versions, but yeah. - yeah, we are still actuallychanging certain things in the basement these days, so. we joke we are stillanimating the basement. - yeah, i guess as a counterpoint, i read a new yorker piecesaying, you guys were actually quoted in that piece, in the studio 360,
and it talks about a filmmaker who, he has to shoot 360s every single,or maybe it was a she, but every single time he shot a take, everyone had to run andhide so only the actors were in view. and you guys had to experiencea similar thing, right? so, we were shooting in the mountains, and we were shooting 360,which is putting the camera kind of opposite in the same,
but we weren't offering the 3d experience, but it's essentially that, you have to set your camera up, then you have to hide from your camera. so, you, in order tocontrol it in any way, you have to be in range,which means finding a good position with a bush nearby, and hiding in that bush. the amount of ticks you get, it's crazy.
but, yeah, it's that. - i would say that was theonly problem we didn't have, because we shot with one camera, so we were all behind that camera. but everything else, yeah. - so, what is vr particularly... vr is really great foran immersive experience, being for experiencinghow you would, you know, feel at a particular scenario.
what does it particularly poor at? is there things that vrshouldn't be applied to? maybe in the story-tellingspace, you know. - i think it's poor at being an analog of traditional film. because we want, we grewup seeing certain things in a, you know, for milicaand i, it was a small, probably crt tv and thetv kept getting bigger, and as it got bigger, thecuts kept getting quicker,
and, you know, we'reable to sort of augment how we perceive realitythrough a flat screen in front of us. and so, you know, forus, there's another world that exists inside that. and then once we actuallytried to jump in it with vr, 'cause vr is kindof dissolving the screen, you no longer have somethingwhere you can look, you can also have your own reality here,
you're being totally immersed in this new, you know, in a new screen, basically. but the problem is a lot ofpeople are trying to take, you know, the sametechniques that they have from filmmaking, you know,where you're doing quick cuts, you're messing with a timeline, you know, doing fades, dissolves, andsome of these things do work and we're able to do that,but if you're the worst thing or the thing that's mostnauseating is if, you know,
if you're moving, and you'renot controlling that yourself. because if we right now were to, you know, all of a sudden, you know, putyou, like change your camera or, you know, yourfirst person perspective without you knowing it,you'd become sick instantly. it's almost like if you're on a train, and you see another train moving, and your body's not sureif you're actually moving, you get a little bitnauseated, or if you're
in an experience in an imax,and you're like, you know, it's just a little tooquick, that is sim sickness, and that is a really big problem in vr, but i think as computers get faster, as we learn to acceptit more, just like we, you know, like the 2d planein front of us is not real, we accept it as being sortof an alternate reality, where we, you know, that'swhere all of our content comes from.
so, as soon as we learnhow to deal with that more, i think our brains, especiallywhen kids are experiencing vr, they're gonna be like,you know, like jet pilots when it comes to whenthey're in their teens and 20s, this will just be more, you know, it'll be more common for them. so, we're really gonna beable to push it to the limits, but, for right now, i thinkit's still at a point where we have to experiment and sort of tip toe
around what we know abouttraditional filmmaking. - thinking about vr as designers,as well as people making, you know, as filmmakers, oneof the interesting things we've found is after wepublished our piece was we had different ways we could view it. like with a headset or,you know, in desktop mode. and so, we started toget our metrics back. we started to be able toanalyze some of the data. and afterwards, we wereapproached by some labs
that were interested,like what would you want if you could have a heatmap of a vr experience? like, what kinds of metrics? and that was a reallyinteresting question for us, and i actually wanna ask youguys, if you could see data or analytics back on terms ofwhat users are experiencing, you know, what would yoube interested in seeing? how could tools help youdesigning an experience? - well, we do, becausewe have small monitors,
where we can actuallysee where you as a viewer are looking at, so we couldsee where you're actually looking at, so that helpedus a lot to understand, you know, what we didright or wrong with giant, but i personally wouldlove to connect with some lab that does really that, you know, i don't know what you call this. yeah. and really measures whileyou're watching the experience,
what are you going through,because that's where i'm the most curious about,the emotions and the impact that the film had on you. and what we, i mean, during sundance, we were approached byted, like people who work for ted talks, they came to see it, and i told them that someof the ted talks really changed my life. they maybe encouraged mein a way to, indirectly,
to make giant, as well. and they said, this isamazing, but we don't have a way to measure that impact. because they don't know whathappens to me when i look at it, and i go and live my life. so, the same way weprobably would never know how giant impacted peopleafter that immediate, you know, so we can measure immediately as they are watching, i guess.
- there are companies that have hit us up, saying that they havemetrics, like sort of an api or, you know, that you canplug into your game engine to be able to get metrics out, you know, as far as where people look, the heat map, sort of being automated, you know, how quickly the person was, you know, perceiving certain queues. there's a lot that willeventually be pretty common,
and you know, which will raise, you know, all sorts of questions about, you know, people's privacy whenit comes to biometrics, and certain things it'll also, i think, people will sort ofwhole-heartedly sign on if it means a better experience for them. i mean, i'm not sure, for us, i think that, ideally,yeah, like milica said, being able to get sortof an emotional response
from people would be huge,but these are also things that are still prettydifficult to measure. - cool. i wanna jump a little bitto, a little bit later in the timeline, todistribution of content. seems like right now, youguys have used festivals and talks like this primarilyto distribute your content. guess you touched alittle bit on the headsets and your coming distribution,but what are the best ways
for someone doing vr to get the word out and put their experiences out? - the best way, i mean,so web vr is something that not a lot of people are, i mean, people are starting to talk about, and that especially withgoogle daydream coming out will be something that'sgonna change sort of, i think, at least the face of consumer vr. because it'll mean that,right now, i don't believe
there's any phones thatare actually certified, but in the next comingmonths they will be released, which, you know, they have allsorts of accelerated graphics cards, and the refresh rateof the screen is really, you know, clear. basically, it's creating astandard, and that will relieve a lot of sim sicknessfrom people, as well. and i think that also,with connection speeds getting faster, the phones getting better,
the screens getting bigger, andalso people being more aware of it, i think thatthat's gonna, you know, it's the culture thatultimately, the culture and the consumer culture,which ultimately will be pushing the technologyforward, 'cause if these units aren't being bought, thenno one's gonna sell them. people say the reason whythere isn't a successful 360 degree camera out thereis 'cause it takes too long for that technology to beengineered and then come out,
and then, as soon as it'sout, it's already done. you know, it's already six month later, there's gonna be another camera out there. so, for us, i would say that, you know, if this is your firstsort of foray into vr, you know, use things thatare easy to prototype with, like the theta, be ableto put it up on something like youtube, because that's a great tool, and it's only gonna get better, and the,
trust me, the peoplebehind youtube are owned by a little company calledgoogle, which is also investing, you know, billions ofdollars into virtual reality, so, you can trust thatthey're gonna be pushing the sort of the frontier of technology, you know, forward, morethan any other company, at least, that i'm aware of, right now. - side question, have you triedall the different headsets and do you have a preference, right now?
a favorite? who's paid you? - we are really not paid by any headset. we did try a lot of them, not all of them, because a lot of them are popping up, the new, smaller companies. we are using for ourexperience oculus cv1. but also, we got a chanceto try sony playstation headset, ps4, and i love itbecause it feels much lighter
on the head, and theydesigned it particularly for gamers who spendhours inside that headset. just the feel of it ismuch lighter and better. but, i think that visually,it's oculus and htc vive. - as far as, yeah, seatedcinematic vr experiences go, i would say that the oculus is better. some people think it's more comfortable. it really, also, everyonehas got very different sort of dimensions ontheir face, their nose,
their eyes, you know, thedistance between their eyes is something that's also important. i have to wear glassesinside of oculus or vive, while samsung has, youknow, the focus wheel. it really depends on, sortof, a lot of it's comfort, but if you wanna be able todo anything that involves room scale or being ableto move around a room, where you're tracked by twodifferent laser trackers called lighthouses, that's the htc vive,
and that's a reallycompelling vr experience, and that's where things like tilt brush, you know, emerged. as far as the optics go,i would say that oculus has a little bit of an upper hand, and the screen quality isjust a little bit better. but we're also, we're gonnabe laughing about these, you know, headsets in threeyears, when these were the only two untetheredheadsets that were available,
and, my god, they were $800and you had to wait, you know, this long to get them. and you had to buy a $1500 computer? like all these problems will be solved in the next three years. everything is going to mobile, and yeah, we're gonna be able to do, basically, we're gonna be able to see other people in this space, have acommunity experience,
using untethered headset,and we'll also be able to hit a button, and the vr will go away, and we'll have an overlayof augmented reality on top of everyone, too. the headsets are all becoming one. so, if you don't wanna be sort of, if the technology's gettingyou down, just wait. it's only getting better. - that's good to hear.
i mean, i tried the oculus two weeks ago, and i still was kind of always conscious that there was this ring,this edge around me. and i think the universereally just started a distance away. but, yeah, this is gonnachange in the future. one thing about scalabilityof the experience, so, we were at the tribeccafilm festival recently, and it seemed like theyhadn't really figured it out,
the lines were super long,there were two headsets, and everyone was just lining up and trying to book experiences. have you seen good ways toorchestrate these experiences? - every festival we attendedhad a different way, and a lot of them just didn't function. we didn't go to tribecca,we were at nab at that time, in las vegas. i think what works the bestfor me is like when you let
maybe just 50 people in that room to try all the different experiences, so you have just alimited number of people, that's one way. and you give them onehour to try everything, and then, docents arehelping them and pushing them to different experiences. or, the other way is reallyto book your exact time slot, and then appear at that time.
- yeah, but, charge themmoney for it, 'cause if, and then give them the moneyback afterward, that's fine. but if you don't give themsomething of their own to put up, then they won't show up. and what happened at gdc isthat everything got booked in the first day, and then,people towards the end were like, "oh, do i have that spot? "well, i'm already eating a hot dog. "somebody else will take it."
and so then, you know,there would just be, you know, massive blocks of vacancy, or maybe 'cause their keynote happened and people weren't thinkingthat far in advance. - so, in that case, just let people book on that exact date. don't let them book in advance. they're not gonna show up. - also, for designing a user experience,
because, you know, people think of lines as being a bad thing, you know, at sundance they got up tobe like five, six hours, which is just excessive,and no one should have to wait in a line that long, you know, unless it's like the supremestore in the east village, it seems. or that's soho, sorry. but, there's actually acaptive audience that you guys
can tap into, if people arewaiting, say for, you know, for 15, 20 minutes,that's another opportunity to be able to give theminformation about the project, to be able to, you know,even show them other content. say your project is in a tethered headset, you know, you could handout google cardbaords that have content preloaded on them. or you could give them something to read, or could have some type ofprojection that's happening.
so be able to, you know, togive them further insight into the project thatyou're currently presenting. i don't think a lot of peopletake advantage of that. you know, that's whatdisney has been doing, for, you know, since it opened,having sort of experiences before the experience. and that is a really sortof a wise way to deal with a crowd. - one thing that you guys talked about,
during the talk was that giventhat you're immersing people in virtual reality now, the viewers have a heightened expectation of reality. i actually wanted to take this opportunity to bring up something thatwe were talking about, i think you experiencedthis ethical component in vr journalism? - yeah, we had a question,in photojournalism there are very strict rules,and in video journalism,
when you're working fora news organization, about how much manipulationcan happen to an image or a video, and whenyou're stitching photos or a video together, thingshappen, things get cut out, especially. in looking at some ofthe raw stitches we had, based off of the finalproduct, where we were trying to optimize for resolution,there were differences, and the editors had pretty hard questions.
they're like, "what were thedecisions that were made?" and i'm wondering if, imean, this is different, 'cause this is kind of anadaptation of true event into a story. but do you guys have thoughts about that? - yeah, we did think about this question before we launched giant,and that's why we mentioned that we decided to givea disclaimer to everyone who comes in, because ifthere are people who lived
during war, there is a possibility we can re-traumatize them,so, we would always say you're entering, it's a war zone. you will be placed insidea war zone with a family, and this piece is looselybased on true events. so they can opt out. and, several people decided not to do it. - yeah, people, there was somebody from, somebody who grew up inisrael said that, you know,
that's just not theexperience that i'm looking for right now. other people, you know, thankedus for letting them know, and then they're like, buti, you know, i feel like i want to do this anyway. and then they said thatyou really did a, you know, that i haven't been broughtback to my basement since that moment. really felt like i was broughtback to when my parents
and i had to hide down there. you know, for us though,i think it was important that we bring people in, but also, yeah, you have to be really careful. especially, as thistechnology gets more real, and we're able to capture, you know, actual people, and, youknow, all the movies from like the 80s and 90sare soon actually becoming a real problem, you know,and there's gonna have
to be eventually, they'rewill have to be some type of legislation around, youknow, around these questions, because experiences getting too real could actually harm people. - yeah, i feel like we ascontent creators do have this moral responsibility,because we are replacing your physical world witha world that we want to put you in. so, it is a huge responsibility.
- all right, last question,and then we'll open it up. what's next for you guys. - so, we would love to make a trilogy. so, giant is part one, atrocitieshumans do to each other. part two, atrocitieswe do to mother nature, and part three is there's still hope, and something bigger than us. so, we would love to do the second part, and we are in a--
- well, we are doing it. pre-production of it, yeah. - yeah, so, we follow the life of a tree from planting a seed to growing up, and, ultimately, whereoftentimes trees end up, being turned into paper. but for us, it's reallyimportant, you know, it's a first personexperience, but you experience what it's like to be, asyou grow, and you know,
we're interested inchanging scale, you know, playing with perspective, and you know, the idea of being able to empathize with something that, you know, isn't human is really exciting for us. but for us, taking the learnigns of giant, you know, being able to understand, being able to communicate the story before they actually put the headset on,
bringing people how yousort of bring people into the vr experienceis hugely important. because, you know, if you're showing a really amazing piece of content, it's like if you'regonna be playing a really emotional song tosomebody, you're not just gonna be playing it offyour laptop, you know, in a crowded room with people. that's sort of like, or, youknow, there's a reason why
movie theaters are builtwhere you go in, you know, the lights go down, andyou have this, you know, an experience, the onlydifference is it' not a communal experience. for us, being able to bringpeople in, sit them down, tell them about it, put the headset on, and then, you know, oncethey're done, be able to sort of, yeah, taketheir own time to sort of take in the experience,that's what we really want
to also emphasize for our next project, and be able to use lots ofdifferent haptic feedback, being able to have, youknow, heat elements, and also different thinginvolving the interactive music. - cool, all right, sothanks everyone for coming. as i said, we do this everyfirst wednesday of the month, so next month there'll be another. november there'll be another. go to interactiondesign.sva.edu/eventsto check that out.
but let's thank winslow and milica again. thank you. (applause)
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