SXSWORLD

see headsets of the size of the Daydream doing room-scale VR, as spending 1.5 hours in Vive or Oculus is not something I think many people would want to do."  This is the rub of Virtual Reality's current market, and one of a few growing pains the emerging industry has experienced. While con- sumers can access VR content that allows them to experience full movies on Netflix or sit courtside at an NBA game via Samsung's Gear VR plat- form, the bulk of what VR creators are working on now are short-form.  As seen at SXSW, these often include experi- mental, experiential projects, such as Félix & Paul Studios' collaborations with Cirque du Soleil, or "Spatium," based on the work of avant-garde hat designer Philip Treacy ... as well as educa- tional offerings such as "Buzz Aldrin's Cycling Pathways To Mars" or the films that are part of the Oculus VR for Good project. For creators like Rogers, this short-format phase is more a feature than a drawback during the VR industry's ado- lescence. Short projects allow financiers to play around in the space.  "There are the likes of Viacom NEXT who funded our last project, 'Chocolate,' and were an awesome support base," he explains. "Viacom NEXT is an R&D part of Viacom (parent com- pany of Paramount Pictures, MTV, etc.) who look at future technologies and support content cre- ators like us to bring our projects to fruition, and they understand that revenue returns are limited right now (especially room-scale), but they see the bigger picture and so the more people that see this, the better."  Which brings to light VR's other growing pain: fragmentation of content distribution. To hear Rogers tell it, this is something the VR market will need to work out before it can ever reach the wide audiences enjoyed by traditional film and television. "We watch movies and TV shows on Netflix," he says. "And we watch music videos on YouTube; we need these type of platforms for VR ASAP."  Between the wide variety of headsets available to consumers—from Oculus to Samsung Gear to Vive and the even wider variety of platforms— there is some mystery about how VR will evolve into a form of mainstream entertainment. It is not, however, difficult to see that creators like Rogers and the folks at 5th Wall, who created "THE MUMMY Zero Gravity VR Experience," are creating immersive, artful content.  As Rogers explains, the unknown is what may be the most exciting thing for creators: "We are taking this blank canvas and doing our best to create amazing work that hopefully will help define this new medium. That's pretty exciting!" " It might not be the most comfortable situa- tion, but perhaps it will be worth it …" This was likely not an uncommon thought for the early adopters as they donned headsets and tested out the many Virtual Reality experiences offered at SXSW 2017. In what is assuredly a growing year-over-year trend, this year's Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality track and Virtual Cinema exhibition featured creators and technol- ogies of various kinds, from film to interactive, gaming, music and even sports, each vying for the opportunity to transport audiences to a new and beautiful world.  This author found himself in one of the fur- thest-flung ballrooms of the Austin Convention Center, wedged into a circular pod chair, the kind one might find in the home of grandpar- ents who have not updated their decor since the 1960s. This chair, manufactured by a company called Positron, is built for the express purpose of delivering 360-degree, immersive cinematic virtual experiences without the added benefit of motion sickness. Twenty of these Positron Voyagers were built expressly for the SXSW debut of "THE MUMMY Zero Gravity VR Experience," an experimental marketing acti- vation from Universal Pictures. The result is a virtual ride with Tom Cruise and the crew of the new film as they shoot a scene from on a Zero-G simulating airplane. VR passengers feel the loss of gravity with the twisting and turning of the Positron chair as Cruise, never one to do any stunt halfway, executes a daring escape from a plane while it plummets from the sky.  Despite the mild discomfort of the one-size- fits-all chair solution, the several-minute-long demo is an impressive show of VR's potential, a sort of DVD extra on steroids. But where it shows off the broad, impressive power of immer- sion that VR offers, there is also a hint of where the VR market has encountered some limitations. Did we enjoy our epic plane ride with Tom Cruise on the set of his next blockbuster? Sure. Would we want to sit in a 360-degree moving chair, heads encompassed by a headset and 3D audio headphones, for the length of an entire film? That seems less certain.  "VR experiences and short-form video in doc- umentary or stories certainly are the natural fit for the Oculus and Vive," explains Adam Rogers, an executive producer for Gentle Manhands, a company that brought its latest project, a dig- ital music video experience called "Chocolate," to SXSW and was part of the Virtual Cinema program.  "To create room-scale immersive movies of a feature length," says Rogers. "I think that will be based on advancements with headsets, where we THE MUMMY Zero Gravity VR, photo by Randy & Jackie Smith MARKET SEES SLOW RISE OF THE VR Machine By neil Miller

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