From the outside Virtual Reality must seem...so far in there. So far into this digital world that's become part of us all. From the outside VR must fall somewhere among time travel and an embodied internet. In other words, somewhere in the future. In the big cities you've heard about VR or have a friend who does "something with VR."
But the future has become a tough concept to pinpoint. The idealist hears autonomous vehicles on the road, Alexa speaking back to him, and conversations about human colonies on Mars, yet the pragmatist knows Uber got suspended from testing autonomous vehicles in Arizona after a fatal crash last month, speaking to Alexa is sometimes like speaking to a 3-year-old, and there are no plans to put a human being inside a spacecraft (let alone establish a society on a planet that would take several years to reach).
Virtual Reality is right in the middle of this search for the ground between human imagination and human capability. Google's two most ubiquitous VR programs: Tiltbrush (in which you draw and paint inside a three-dimensional space) and Google Earth (in which you walk the streets of any city in the world) provide a taste of how vast this technology will become. In these early programs you begin to understand how we'll one day educate children with this tech, test architectural structures before building them in the physical world, and reunite with deceased family members. The ideas are real, yet realizing them still feels off in one of those years that doesn't yet read like a year - somewhere like 2045.
On the inside of this industry we've speculated about what needs to happen in order to move this tech to the forefront. We've worked to help it shed the stigma of being the next gaming home for 17-year-old techies who stay up all night firing first-person shooters. On the inside we've seen firsthand VR as a catalyst for human interaction, education, and global exploration. It has become our work to make all this imagining attainable.
So what does need to happen? Well, some of the wheels are already in motion. Even before Facebook, Google, and Microsoft invested heavily in VR, there was a writer. Ernest Cline. He was 38 when Crown Publishing printed his first novel, "Ready Player One." The next day Warner Bros. bought the rights to convert the script into a film, hiring Cline to co-write the screenplay. Nearly a decade later, the movie has arrived in theaters, directed by the most famous name in film - Spielberg.
The story begins in the year 2045 when - resulting from global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels - the world is mired in an energy crisis. The OASIS is where many folks go to escape their decimated surroundings. It's a Virtual World accessible with a visor and enhanced with haptic technology. In the opening pages of the novel, the richest man in the world - James Holiday - has passed away, leaving behind a video message. He announces to the public that he's hidden a golden egg inside OASIS, and the first person to discover it will inherit his wealth. Teenager Wade Watts is the main character.
It arrived in theaters on March 29 and grossed roughly $50 million on its opening weekend (only Black Panther and A Quiet Place grossed more on opening weekends this year). By the end of its third weekend Ready Player One earned a combined domestic/international gross of nearly half a billion dollars, making it one of the top 10 grossing Spielberg productions since we learned his name in the summer of 1975, with Jaws.
Ready Player One (the film), an action/thriller, is not meant to update the public on the current state of VR. So...the industry isn't wealthy enough to attract the the most highly trained coders and push the cutting edge of computer science. Secondly, just like the futuristic industries mentioned at the top, we don't yet understand how this will influence the human mind. Remember, this is a technology predicated on immersing people in a digital world. What happens when human eyes perceive a new reality, when movement of your arms and legs pushes you deeper into a manmade environment? What influence does it have on the brain, the psyche, and our perception of reality?
It's not the first time technology and storytelling have come together to influence the mind. While we’re on the topic, let’s take a look back at Spielberg, who - as a 29-year-old director in 1975 - created a new world and called it Amity Island, the setting of Jaws. He brought viewers to another place and with it ushered The New Hollywood Era. I remember waking up in the middle of the night screaming for my sister to get out of the water. The anticipation of the shark’s arrival, the terror among the people on Amity Island, the sound of the bloody ocean, and the feeling of raw danger circling me. It created an affect on the human brain. And we’re talking before computer graphics. When the shark was mechanical, the film schedule shot according to the Cape Cod tides, and the music there as a warning.
Considering that, it seems fitting that Spielberg has now helped move the needle forward on the next version of immersive storytelling. We're a long way from this Virtual space being a refuge from a fossil-fuel-depleted world, but we rarely turn to Spielberg for practicality. We often turn to him for imagination. The question is so tangible that it's become tantalizing...what is possible in Virtual Reality? If not a new world to rescue us from global warming, then...?
For hundreds of years we've asked the writers, the directors, the creators to show us their vision and help provide insight to these very questions. So consider for a moment that two of the most commercialized storytellers in action today - Ernest Cline and Steven Spielberg - are not storytelling in VR. They are storytelling about VR. Until that changes, Virtual Reality stays in 2045.