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State of Places - What is VR?
A Virtual Reality program is a program written and realized to be lived by means of a Virtual Reality Headset or HMD (Head Mounted Display), even if it can be lived (in a different and often degraded way) by means of a mouse, a tablet or a telephone.
It is a change in the position of the viewer, who is no longer in front of the TV set, but in the center of the program.
The specificity of the VR broadcasting medium is that it tends to recreate a realistic space from a perceptual point of view. The body regains the keys of sensory perception which are the basis of the perception scheme of our environment, by stimulating in a coherent way different senses such as the visual and auditory.
In this sense, allowing the viewer to turn around and see his sound and visual universe evolve with his movement, radically changes his position in front of a program. He no longer watches a program as an outside viewer, he is, by virtue of his position, totally involved in the story, he finds himself in the program.
This radical paradigm shift in terms of the viewer's physical positioning, which itself generates a different emotional positioning, introduces a number of specificities, both on a technical and narrative level.
Writing for virtual reality means transforming the space of the narrative. It means switching from the two-dimensional screen to the three-dimensional sphere, and up to the exploration of unfinished space in the case of free-navigation content.
In the same way, technically producing a Virtual Reality program implies taking into account the entire visual and sound space. It is necessary to anticipate the potential movements of the user and the visual and sound rendering associated with each movement and position.
VR-related uses
How do different industries take over virtual or mixed reality and why?
Realism
In the last two years, the field of Virtual Reality, in which we will include Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality, has been invested by many industrial and commercial branches.
Thus we have seen the aeronautics industry use Virtual Reality to train its pilots and mechanics or to control security measures. Medicine has used VR as much for the training of its personnel as for helping certain patients to better live with particular treatments, to calm pain, or to manage anxiety. The pornographic industry does not lack creativity in this field and has produced a profusion of 360° films to which it sometimes even adds other sensory stimuli.
Whatever the objectives of these companies, we note that they use Virtual Reality for its ability to immerse the user in a realistic universe.
Putting the user at the center of a real or realistic universe in which it is simpler and less expensive to find oneself virtually thanks to a helmet rather than physically. The primary objective is therefore economical because it allows to provide a similar experience to several people without having to pay for it.
Improving the real
Other areas such as building also use Virtual Reality. Architecture uses VR to make construction or interior design projections. Real estate uses it for virtual tours. Museums or cities allow users equipped with headsets, tablets or telephones to visit places by adding personalized information, historical reconstructions or animations: audio guides enhanced by video, so to speak. These applications, which are superimposed on reality to modify, improve or recreate it, use VR for its ability to enrich reality.
For example, it is possible to visit the Popes' Palace in Avignon, taking advantage of the furniture and decorations that have since disappeared, thanks to an Augmented Reality application on a shelf, which shows a window from the past to reality.
The Timescope self-service VR terminal, installed at the Place de la Bastille, allows users to go back in time at will on a time line that will allow them to rediscover the place where they are, in 360°. We are not proposing a change of point of view, but a change of era. The audio of course is integrated into the experience.
It should be noted that in this case again the VR makes it possible, at a lower cost, to anticipate projects under construction and has a definite economic interest.
Inventing new worlds
But Virtual Reality is not always used for economical reasons. It is also used to create imaginary worlds, give sensations, tell stories and generate emotions.
VR is also part of the world of entertainment: selling dreams, awakening, marveling.
This is the case of certain video games, fictions told by filmmakers: Cinematic VR, documentary programs written by television and which use VR to change the role, the positioning of the viewer to the story.
VR in its specificity of reversing roles in relation to the television set, speaks to the viewer in a totally different way. The user can perceive himself as visible to the protagonists of the story, in the center, involved, touched differently. Whether active or passive, he can take the place of a protagonist.
Thus, Notes on blindness offers a new experience. It was created based on the testimony and diary of John Hull, who lost his sight little by little and explained step by step how he can see thanks to the sounds he hears.
The spectator, wearing an VR helmet, listens to John Hull's voice, while visualizing how a blind person builds up mental images from what he hears. How a tree is only visible if its leaves move with the wind, that only sound elements have an existence for it, and why "on a clear day" and a noisy, windy day, the wind, like all other sound stimuli, traces the contours of the shapes of the world around it and allows him to see with his ears.
This type of program, although already current because produced today, has not finished evolving and developing. Productions are beginning to diversify but the grammar is not written, the codes are constantly being pushed around, the only limits are technical, but are pushed back day after day, so that it is impossible to know what steps will be taken in a year's time, let alone in which direction.
The manufacturing techniques, although using the most advanced technologies of the moment (motion capture, 3D rendering, binauralization, haptic feedback, etc.) are invented, diverted and tweaked according to the needs and desires to provoke certain sensations.
More than a century after Méliès, enthusiasts are pushing the limits of creation to tell their stories and reach their audience in new ways. They test, try, modify and make creations evolve. Universal standards and formats do not exist and are difficult to anticipate at the moment as we do not yet know what this new media will become.
How does television use VR?
Can TV produce VR without betraying itself?
Editorial intent is what defines a type of program. It is neither the technical means implemented nor the broadcasting medium that define its belonging to one media or another.
Virtual Reality is a way to involve the viewer differently, literally changing his point of view. To allow him to understand differently, to move him, or to inform him.
So television can now produce linear documentaries that are shown on a television channel, as well as produce an in situ installation. The Enemy is an installation in which the spectator, in a dedicated place and equipped with an VR helmet and a backpack, will go to meet enemy warriors and find themselves face to face, in a three-way dialogue. He will be at the same time the passive mediator like a pain psychologist. In this way, he reaps the word, and above all, he is the third character of the triptych, the one to whom one speaks, because these enemies cannot yet speak to each other. Without him, this dialogue does not take place. If he doesn't look at them, the encounter doesn't exist.
A total paradigm shift
From passivity to interactivity - from Simultaneity to Replay / VoD: paradigm shift or simple technological evolution?
Ontological change or simple technological evolution?
There is a tendency to think that the interactivity offered to users is a new trend that upsets the codes of television, which, however, in its early days, was a model of passivity.
At the moment, its broadcasting model is one to all: I make a program that I broadcast live or recorded. This program is received in real time by as many people as they want simultaneously.
The viewer is passive most of the time.
However, we can think that this intrinsic passivity of the viewer in front of his television set has not always been an objective in itself, but a constraint suffered due to technical obstacles.
Looking at television programs, one realizes that there have been a multitude of attempts to include the viewer in the program. These attempts have been more or less successful and have included sometimes limited interaction. Either because it was only possible to involve a limited number of viewers or because the interaction was limited.
The following are some emblematic examples of attempts to involve viewers:
Télétactica, broadcast on Antenne 2 in the program Récré A2. This program allowed children to make cut-outs and glue them to their televisions. Thanks to static electricity, the pieces of paper held themselves on the TV set.
It is also one of the first forms of transmedia. An associated magazine offered pre-cut sheets to make the experience easier.
Another rather different example, but which required a physical engagement of the viewer in front of his television, the program Gym tonic (1982 to 1984) remained cult, this program proposed to make the viewers do sports in sportswear in front of their television.
Finally, in 1992, the program Hugo délire (1992) offered viewers the opportunity to call and interact live using the voice frequency keys on their telephones. They could then drive a car live on the set. Not only did they act, but they interacted because their actions were visible on air.
It can also be considered to a lesser extent that any game show with the participation of viewers, or in the presence of viewers in the audience, is an attempt to involve and bring the viewer into the program. By identification, this type of program, such as game shows or even reality shows, are, in a way, programs involving the viewer.
As for the question of simultaneity of broadcasting, we realize that as soon as it was possible to record programs, almost all households equipped themselves with VCRs, to have the leisure to watch a program when they wanted to, as well as to re-watch it. Video clubs only became obsolete late, when VoD and downloading (legal or not) appeared. The ambition to be able to control one's TV stream has always existed, even if it was only recently made possible and simple.
An opportunity to seize
Is virtual reality an asset to upset the codes of narration and transform the relationship between the viewer and the media?
The evolution of technologies today allows us to involve the viewer more and more, Virtual Reality is one of the obvious examples. By changing the paradigm of passivity, and putting the viewer back at the center of the action.
In the case of VR content, the viewer can have a personalized experience in which he will be active and can interact with the environment.
It is the editorial intent that defines the genre and purpose of a program: to tell a story, entertain, educate or inform.
Virtual Reality is an additional way to involve the viewer, to allow him/her to understand differently, to move or to inform.
In the past, programs that involved the viewer, gave people directions on what to do: move, play, cut. Now they are the ones who take the lead, they become not only active, but they also make decisions. The Tantaleprogram, produced by France Télévisions (in 2016) is an example of interactivity in which the user's actions (his decisions) influence the course of the story.
Another form of socialization
Is Virtual Reality meant for us to live alone and isolated in a bubble or is it a step towards another form of entertainment, creation and socialization?
While television is seen as a unifying mass media, the detractors of new technologies such as VR or interactive media tend to criticize the risk of Otaku syndrome (Japanese teenage geek self-containment).
However many examples come to reverse this idea. First of all because there are Virtual Reality rooms where young people and families come together to live their first Virtual Reality experiences. Some of these experiences are to be lived with others. They are either social experiences or team experiences that stimulate group spirit, collaborative actions or mutual aid.
Vivre une expérience personnelle n’est pas toujours synonyme de recentrage ou de renfermement sur soi. De nombreuses expériences permettent de stimuler l’empathie, de se rapprocher de l’autre parfois encore inaccessible en réel. L’expérience Carne y arena propose de vivre 6 minutes avec des migrants qui passent la frontière. Ceux qui l’ont vécue, les pieds dans le sable, le vent dans le visage, en sont sortis transformés. Comme une démonstration de la capacité sans équivalent de la VR à faire prendre conscience de l’autre. En se projetant dans sa vie, dans son corps et dans sa tête. L’image de présentation de Carne y Arena est un cœur, avec ses ventricules et ses artères, ce cœur renvoie autant au corps qu’à la personne qui peut s’émouvoir et ressentir. Le spectateur devient sujet.
Is the audiovisual media too minimal?
VR, a development opportunity for the audiovisual industry?
Virtual reality is the set of devices that allow to immerse oneself in a virtual 3D environment, thanks to a virtual reality headset or HMD (head mounted display).
The impression of immersion is further enhanced by the user's ability to interact with this environment via not only visual and auditory stimuli, but also haptic stimuli such as the simulation of the sensation of touch or force feedback: kinesthesia. Other senses can be stimulated more rarely such as smell or taste. The sensation of living a real experience then becomes extremely disturbing.
As soon as the user has the ability to move in a visual and sound universe, thanks to the movements of his body, he stimulates more than just his hearing and sight. It also appeals to the sensation of his body in space and his feet on the ground. We can therefore consider that the most technically refined version of the 360° video or Virtual Reality offers more in terms of sensory stimulation than a movie or TV show.
Thanks to today's technologies, television is no longer exclusively subject to the broadcasting of linear programs on TV sets. The multiplicity of its channels and its modes of diffusion, and not excluding itself from face-to-face installations, television as a producer of programs can thus use everything that is permitted by new technologies and does not deprive itself of this by exploring all avenues, even if it means abandoning them later on if it turns out that they do not or not yet meet an audience.
Thus, different types of programs such as sports, news, documentary or fiction use VR to reach its audience differently. The viewing modes for this type of content can be diverse, whether they are possible using telephones, tablets, computers or VR headsets, we speak of Virtual Reality as the viewing mode of a program in which the user finds himself at the center of the universe that is proposed to him and can move around on a rotating axis.
So we are not talking about virtual sets, or "Augmented Reality" on TV sets. Term that designates a process of special effects or image synthesis in real time on a live image.
Although rendering the program using an in situ VR helmet is the Holy Grail that allows one to enjoy a creation in the most respectful way possible of the original intention, creators are imagining other ways to bring these experiences to life.
Thus,The Enemy has an Augmented Reality application that allows Smartphone owners to see in their real environment the warriors who asked and answered the questions in the exhibition mentioned earlier.
The projection of viewers, (in the sense that they are both immersed in a world and that a process of identification takes place) into a world, in front of people they are going to meet, can be done on the condition that they have a faculty of abstraction and projection in this universe. It is necessary to accept its codes, to play the game. This projection, even if it is still unusual, is nothing compared to the one we make when reading a novel, which only describes situations, which thanks to our imagination we translate into images, into actions, and which we end up living.
Unlike books, what makes these processes "degraded" because they are not technologically immersive, programs belonging to the world of VR/AR/MR is the fact that they do not present the program in its entirety, in a frontal way. The discovery of the universe will be made according to the movements initiated by the user, who, even if he is not equipped with an VR helmet, will only have a partial vision of the content and will discover the universe as he pleases during the narration.
This process of immersion by projection is very well known in the world of video games.
In video games there are two types of projections in the character: Identification can be done through an avatar whose movements are controlled (TPS: third personnal shooting) where the allocentric point of view (we see the character we embody) does not imply the acceptance of the other's body as his own, but requires a sufficient projection to be able to control it.
The other mode of identification is done by making only the player's hands visible (FPS: first personnal shooting) and thus gives the impression that one manipulates the objects oneself.
It is natural to understand why the world of video games has taken advantage of the possibilities offered by VR to immerse the player who, by putting on an VR helmet and visualizing his own hands, finds himself more easily immersed and actor of the narration.
Just as there can be "degraded" or reduced Virtual Reality experiences, there are also experiences that push the limits of perception by stimulating a maximum of our senses.
Thus, Marie Jourdren's Alice experience is an experience that we think we live alone, but it is much more than that.
When you put on your VR helmet in a shed and a rabbit-headed man addresses you, presents you with a deck of cards that you take with your hands, that all the elements you see in this virtual universe are palpable, whether it is the playing cards, the pedestal table or the fried egg. Whether you are offered a taste of a mushroom and are blown a sweet and fragrant smoke in your face that you can see and smell, you find it hard to believe that the universe around you is virtual.
Even when you bite into the mushroom (rather sweet and meringue-textured) and you grow (which is like seeing the world around you get smaller and smaller) more and more, everything seems very real to you.
The most disturbing part of this experience is not what you see or hear, it is the interaction you have with the characters you meet. The dialogues are absurd at times, as are the situations, but the interaction is real.
The characters are in fact improvisational actors in motion capture (with sensors on their clothes). They improvise conversations with you, question you, push you into your entrenchments, your contradictions, your reticence. It is a conversation in which you are another person: Alice. You are asked to answer questions. Are you going to answer for Alice, for yourself? Are you going to play a character? What is there about you in the Alice you bring to life?
You are at the center of the story, this story is yours, it is only for you, Yes, but it is lived thanks to others who participate intensely in this creation. It questions you as rarely happens.
Another important factor to note, is that to live this experience fully, you must accept to trust. You let go of all your sensory references, you dive into a world whose codes you don't know, barriers fall one by one until you talk about yourself to a stranger with a caterpillar head of whom you know nothing and who spits his smoke in your face.
We come out of it transformed, upset, we lived something else, something that is then difficult to share, it is the difficulty to tell a dream, which belongs to us.
VR is a media as such, it won't replace TV just as cinema hasn't replaced the novel, radio hasn't replaced concerts.
Culture, entertainment or information will now have to make do with another medium, whose codes of narration have yet to be invented, the possibilities are immense and a question on ethics will have to be addressed.
We speak to the intimate and involve the body as much as the mind, the question of consent and limits are important to define for the future.
New ethical questions?
Where is the boundary between simulation of reality and manipulation of the spectator?
Ethical questions have had their place as soon as content is created to be seen, and all the more so as it is lived. Legend has it that the first spectators of the famous film "Arrival of a train in Ciotat station" by the Lumière brothers would have fled when the train arrived, fearing that it was real.
Beyond the fictional aspect of this tale, which perfectly fulfilled its function by making this session legendary, the question of the reception of a work by a spectator is crucial. It is all the more crucial because we want to immerse the user in a universe (dreamlike or realistic) that calls upon his natural perceptive functions. In this sense, we make him/her experience real sensations even if the world in which he/she is projected is unreal.
Emotions in the cinema can be immense, they are multiplied tenfold if all the senses are stimulated and if, in addition, one identifies oneself as one of the protagonists.
Interactive programs are in their infancy. In the first case, the interaction is scripted, and played by people in motion captured as in Alice. In this case, the interaction is total and bluffing: One must accept to trust people and enter into the proposed narration.
Second case, by far the most common: the interaction is defined in advance by rules, and therefore programmed. In The Enemy, the characters follow you with their eyes and speak only when you pay attention to them, they will move backwards if you approach them too closely. The interaction is real but the keys are quickly assimilated and you understand quite quickly what are the implicit codes of the interaction. You just have to do a few "tests" to understand when the interlocutor stops and starts again, moves backwards or turns his head. Understanding the interaction keys quickly is not a problem for believing in reality, it is even a reassuring condition for users who like to know a minimum of what is waiting for them.
If these codes are not understood right away by users, and this may be a desired effect, but one that should be handled sparingly and with full knowledge of the facts, because users are not mere spectators. They live this experience with all their senses, their body. The emotions they feel are raw, without the filter of hindsight that one can easily have in front of a TV set, these emotions are very real.
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence suggest that the field of possibilities is immense in terms of human-machine interaction, including when the machine will be a humanized character in a universe created in VR. The question of the limits to be posed is already topical as the subjects addressed are intimate or serious. It is by creating that the boundaries will appear. Television and cinema have always been in tune with reality. It is sometimes necessary to improve, to modify the image, the sounds in order to report a situation.
In VR, it is the same thing except that we change the world in which we put our spectator and not the one we show him, the difference is of importance.
